Recommendations
Books Like The Bostonians
Best books to read after The Bostonians by Henry James
Henry James's most political novel (1886) — the struggle between the Boston feminist Olive Chancellor and the conservative Mississippian Basil Ransom for possession of the natural orator Verena Tarrant, set against the women's suffrage movement; James's most directly American narrative and his clearest engagement with the political battles of post-Civil War American culture. These recommendations extend the experience through James's other novels and through American fiction that engages with suffrage, reform, and women's rights.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's great novel of the same period and the fullest treatment of the American woman's situation — where The Bostonians treats the question politically (what should American women be free to do?), The Portrait of a Lady treats it psychologically (what does one exceptional American woman actually choose, and why?); the two together are James's most sustained engagement with American female freedom.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's novel (1899) is the most direct American fictional companion to The Bostonians — Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires against the constraints of Creole society parallels Verena Tarrant's awakening to her own situation against the competing claims of Olive and Ransom; both novels are about what a woman does when she becomes conscious of the social constraints on her.
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Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Alcott's novel was the most important American precursor to The Bostonians' treatment of women's aspirations — where James treats the suffrage movement with ironic complexity, Alcott treats female domestic ambition with warm affection; the comparison illuminates the range of late-nineteenth-century American attitudes toward women's public and professional lives.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's novel is the most devastating American companion to The Bostonians — where James treats the question of female freedom in a political key, Wharton treats it in a social-economic key; Lily Bart's destruction by the New York society world parallels Verena's manipulation by the competing claims of Olive and Ransom, but with more economic precision.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's dystopian novel approaches The Bostonians' gender politics from the opposite direction — where James shows a conservative man opposing women's suffrage in a realistic context, Atwood extrapolates what success of that conservatism would look like in a speculative one; The Bostonians and The Handmaid's Tale together define the ideological range of American women's fiction.
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft's foundational feminist text (1792) is the historical predecessor to the arguments that Verena Tarrant makes on the suffrage platform in The Bostonians — reading the philosophical source alongside James's fictional treatment illuminates what the women's movement was arguing for and why Ransom's resistance was so culturally significant.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's most accessible novel and the domestic counterpart to The Bostonians' political treatment of women's situation — Catherine Sloper has neither Verena's public voice nor Olive's political program, but her quiet suffering under her father's control is the private-sphere version of the same female dispossession that The Bostonians treats on the public stage.
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Democracy
by Henry Adams
Adams's political novel (1880) is the most important American companion to The Bostonians as a treatment of Washington and Boston political culture in the same period — where James focuses on the women's movement, Adams focuses on the political corruption of the Grant era; both novels use their subjects as a lens for diagnosing the moral state of American democracy after the Civil War.
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