Product Description

This brilliant satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?

“The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James,” writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction. “It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals . . . [written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed—and wildly comic—realism.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107341 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-09
• Released on: 2003-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Review
?As devastating in its wit as it is sharp in its social critique of sexual politics. No writer in America had dared the subject before. No one has done it so well since.? ?The New Republic -- Review

Review
“As devastating in its wit as it is sharp in its social critique of sexual politics. No writer in America had dared the subject before. No one has done it so well since.” —The New Republic

From the Publisher
Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. All books published since 1993 have also been completely restyled: all type has been reset, to offer a clarity and ease of reading unique among editions of the classics; a vibrant, full-color cover design now complements these great texts with beautiful contemporary works of art. But the best feature must be Everyman's uniquely low price. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards.

Customer Reviews

independence versus romance
The astonishing thing about this book -- and a lot of Henry James's writing -- is his insight into the problems of women. This book deals with the problem of independence and freedom. Most of us, let's admit it, love the idea of being swept off our feet by some competent, assertive male. It's a real turn-on. If you don't believe it, check out how many successful professional women secretly read historical romances by the boxload. The problem comes the next morning when he starts to take control, bit by bit, of your entire life. In this book you have Olive, who is not, I think, a lesbian but someone who is very lonely and doesn't trust men and Verena, who likes men just fine, but is, for the moment anyway, under the spell of Olive and her feminist ideology. Are these our only options? Verena Makes her choice, but James notes that the tears she sheds may not, unhappily, be her last.

James' Satiric Vision
Though James is certainly not known for his sense of humor, he displays a keen sense of satire in this novel. The two senses are not identical--many readers expect satire to make them laugh out loud, and those readers will be disappointed in this book. James' satire is more likely to make readers feel uncomfortable. He repeatedly mocks the two main characters and their struggle to control a young woman who hardly seems worth the effort that these two egoists put into her pursuit. James allows Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom (whose names evoke the satiricomic tradition in which he is writing) to take themselves seriously while allowing the readers to see them as stereotypes. While satire depends on such stereotypes, James' fiction typically delves into the psychological. At times, he is able to keep this balance, but often the tension is too great and the characters seem to fall flat. Verena Tarrant--the object of Olive and Basil's affection--is virtually absent psychologically (as others have noted), but her lack of character is built into the novel. She begins as her father's possession, and the novel hinges on whether Olive or Basil get to own her next. While the novel is certainly not without faults, it is interesting to watch a novelist as self-conscious as James attempt to write a novel of this type. While he wasn't destined to become a comic genius, this novel is a step toward the psychological, satirical and comic success he was to have in a novel such as "The Ambassadors."

A simple, well-written, North/South love story.
Henry James's, "The Bostonians," is a simple, but increasingly entertaining love story set in the years soon after the end of the Civil War. Basil Ransom, a true Southern gentleman from Mississippi, has moved North (specifically, to New York City) to try and start a career away from the impoverished South of the Reconstruction days. Shortly after moving North, he pays a visit, at her behest, to the Boston house of his distant cousin, Olive Chancellor. Olive, a stalwart in the women's rights movement of the time, invites Basil to her home in order to offer help and assistance to her Southern cousin, but she also wishes to save him from the flawed ways he certainly must have taken on growing up in the South. Her self-seeking, ulterior motives fail miserably, of course.

It is through Olive that Basil Ransom meets Verena Tarrant, the young woman who has left her lower middle-class family to move in with and be molded by Olive. Verena has a tremendous speaking ability which caught Olive's (and the other women's (womyn's?) movement leaders') attention. But ultimately, Verena also catches Basil's attention... not for her feminist diatribes, but for her beauty and the passion of her speeches. Basil is instantly struck by Verena, and from this point onward the plot focuses as Basil attempts to seek out his love interest who is highly guarded by Olive, Verena's parents, and several others.

The dialogue between Olive and her friends with Basil Ransom, is a constant back and forth that is civil on the surface, but boiling with hostility underneath the social niceties. While Basil is always cool and focused as he tracks the object of his love, Olive Chancellor only becomes more paranoid as she sees that she is gradually losing her young charge... to a Southern Neanderthal. "The Bostonians" meanders through the first couple hundred pages with witty dialogue between the alien Basil and his new peers, but as his focus intensifies, so does the plot. James draws all this circling and stalking into a final, climactic scene that many will be cheering, but one that many modern-day feminists and their sympathizers will be cursing.