The Bostonians Reading Order

The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James is his most American novel and arguably his most political — a story about the struggle between the progressive reformer Olive Chancellor and the conservative Mississippian Basil Ransom for possession of the natural orator Verena Tarrant, set against the backdrop of the women's suffrage movement in 1870s and 1880s Boston. The novel's treatment of the suffrage movement is politically complicated: James gives genuine weight to the feminist arguments while also allowing Ransom's reactionary resistance its own integrity, and the love triangle between Olive, Ransom, and Verena is presented with an ambiguity that has produced very different feminist and anti-feminist readings. The Bostonians is James's most novelistically direct narrative — less convoluted than the late novels — and a useful bridge between his accessible early work and his more demanding mature style.