Jean Stafford recalled that she began writing Boston Adventure soon after she moved in the summer of 1940 to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the spring of 1941, she wrote a 175-page outline of the novel while staying with her sister, Mary Lee Stafford Frichtel, on her ranch in Hayden, Colorado. Stafford sent the outline to the Houghton, Mifflin publishing firm, which failed to express interest in acquiring the novel. She continued to work on the manuscript after moving to New York City in the summer of 1941, using the title “The Outskirts.” In early 1942 she sent the first third of the novel to Harcourt, Brace and Company, where it was read by Frank V. Morley, the editor-in-chief of the trade division. Morley passed the manuscript on to Robert Giroux, a junior editor at the firm, with a note asking: “I found that it kept holding me; but will it keep hold of a public?” Giroux later wrote that he was so “enthralled” while reading the manuscript on a commuter train that he missed several stops. Stafford and Giroux signed a contract on April 30, 1942, for the novel’s publication by Harcourt, Brace, with Stafford receiving a $500 advance. In the summer of 1942 Stafford and her first husband, the poet Robert Lowell, moved to Monteagle, Tennessee, where they shared a house with the novelist Caroline Gordon and her husband, the poet and critic Allen Tate. On February 1, 1943, Stafford submitted a manuscript to Lambert Davis at Harcourt, Brace (Giroux was now serving in the navy). Davis responded in March, praising the novel while raising questions about its style. Stafford also received critical comments from Gordon and Tate and began making extensive revisions and cuts. She continued to revise and cut the manuscript while staying at the Yaddo artists’ colony in the summer of 1943 and submitted a final version to Harcourt, Brace in January 1944. Two excerpts from the novel, which had been retitled Boston Adventure at the suggestion of the publisher, appeared before publication: “The Wedding—Beacon Hill” in the June 1944 number of Harper’s Bazaar, and “Hotel Barstow” in the Summer 1944 number of Partisan Review.
Boston Adventure was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Company on September 21, 1944, in a first printing of 22,000 copies. By May 1945 the Harcourt, Brace edition had sold a total of 35,000 copies, while another 199,000 copies had been sold through the mail by the Book League of America. (The novel was also published in a condensed paperback Armed Services Edition that sold 144,000 copies.) An English edition was published in London by Faber & Faber in October 1946. Harcourt, Brace subsequently included Boston Adventure, along with The Mountain Lion and Stafford’s collection of short stories Children Are Bored on Sunday, in The Interior Castle, an omnibus volume published in 1953. Stafford did not revise the novel after its initial American publication. This volume prints the text of the 1944 Harcourt, Brace edition of Boston Adventure, but corrects a typesetting error that appeared in that edition: “Der Traum den Rote Kammer” becomes “Der Traum der Roten Kammer.”
This volume presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce nontextual features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features and are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number of the hardcover edition: 40.16, zwansig; 136.1, gansbart; 151.37, steeds paw; 181.25, coincidence I; 212.3, intentions” had; 225.34, perigrinations; 235.37, evening.; 246.27, exigesis; 253.37, tulipes noire; 261.37, Winetka; 265.13–14, excrutiating; 273.5, up I’m; 282.30, Gardiner’s; 294.9, Happle; 324.35, them.); 350.3, sheath; 361.15, exigesis; 367.7, last; 383.25, other’s; 393.7, clam-bake; 394.29, practiticed; 401.28, mornning; 408.18, Walter; 410.6, Imensee; 413.4, perigrinations; 418.39, marveilleuse; 431.26, forbears; 441.27, it’s; 446.18, veiw; 450.37, Aggasiz; 452.38, Katherine; 463.14, Britanny; 492.27, connossieur.