1883 ‘The scene of the story’, wrote Henry James in his notebook – that rich repository of observations, anecdotes, gossip and creative ideas that fed into so many of his novels and short fiction – ‘is laid in Boston and its neighborhood’. ‘It relates an episode connected with the so-called “woman’s movement”.’ The heroine was to be beautiful, ‘a very clever and “gifted” young woman, … [the] daughter of old abolitionists, spiritualists, transcendentalists, etc.’, a fluent public speaker, able to win ‘large audiences’ to her cause.
The tone is dismissive – the quotation marks make that clear, even without the ‘etc.’ after the various ‘isms’ that (to James’s mind) had so plagued Boston. But he complicates the issue by bringing onto the scene another woman, this time from a ‘rich, exclusive, conservative family’, someone without ‘talent for appearing in public’, who has ‘conceived a passionate admiration for our young girl’ and ‘dreams that the two can work together to “revolutionize the condition of women”’.
Enter the fly in the ointment, though, in the shape of a handsome young man, just returned from ten years in the West, who falls for the beautiful orator while sharing none of her ambitions. He proposes marriage, on condition that she give up her ‘mission’. The long struggle – between the two women, and in the mind of the younger between her ideals and attraction to the man – finally ends in ‘various vicissitudes, with her letting everything go, breaking forever with her friend, in a terrible final interview’.
No prizes for guessing that James was plotting out what would become The Bostonians – not least because the novel, first serialised in The Century from February to February, 1885–6, would follow the sketch so closely in both story and characters, in the shape of Verena Tarrant, Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom. The one crucial difference, though, is that James decided to have Ransom come, not from the West, but from the South. His was a slave-holding family, and he had fought in the Civil War. This makes him a much greater threat to Olive – coming very much from the other side of the abolitionist campaign, yet also mature and (and Olive has to admit) seasoned by loss and danger.
The Bostonians may (unusually for James) have been set in America, but it did little to allay the contempt of such as Theodore Roosevelt (see 29 June), who would continue to dismiss James as an effete turncoat.