A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
()
About this ebook
Read more from Gale
A Study Guide for James Clavell's "Shogun" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA study guide for Frank Herbert's "Dune" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Macbeth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Louis Sachar's "Holes" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Orwell's Animal Farm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for James Joyce's "James Joyce's Ulysses" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: JEAN PIAGET Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Bakery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALBERT BANDURA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Business Plans Handbook: Furniture Businesses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide (New Edition) for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Orwell's 1984 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horsemen" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Shirley Jackson's The Lottery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for "Postmodernism" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide (New Edition) for William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
Related ebooks
The Rhetorical Short Story: Best American Short Stories on War and the Military, 1915-2006 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJulius Caesar by William Shakespeare (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMai Buk Ah Kriol/Inglish Poaymz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe reputation of philanthropy since 1750: Britain and beyond Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlight from the USSR: Georgian Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales of the Jazz Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTransatlantic Sketches by Henry James (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRecollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPierrot Mon Ami Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pale Woman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Quick Guide to "The Return of the Native" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGale Researcher Guide for: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and American Indian Poetry in the Romantic Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHuman Matter: A Fiction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A study guide for Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for H. H. Munro's "The Interlopers" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaves of the Rust Belt: Ohio Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Budapest Noir: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America's Presidential Transitions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLady Chatterley's Lover Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Isak Dinesen's "Sorrow-Acre" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRenditions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFoot Prints of Destiny Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBleak House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Literature Companion: Wise Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Little America in Western Australia: The US Naval Communication Station at North West Cape and the Founding of Exmouth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLady into Fox Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Criticism For You
The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Power of Habit: by Charles Duhigg | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Thorns and Roses: A Novel by Sarah J. Maas | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Circe: by Madeline Miller | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Bad Feminist: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5SUMMARY Of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in Healthy Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Reader’s Companion to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lincoln Lawyer: A Mysterious Profile Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJust Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians"
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
A Study Guide for Henry James's "The Bostonians" - Gale
11
The Bostonians
Henry James
1886
Introduction
In his 1886 novel The Bostonians, the American novelist Henry James offers a nuanced, incisive portrayal of the women's rights movement as it churned and gathered steam in the 1870s. Following the turmoil of the Civil War, many Boston area intellectuals and reformers turned from the accomplished cause of abolitionism to the new quest for suffrage and other rights for women. James recognized this movement's relevance in a journal entry of April 8, 1883, as cited in Leon Edel's biography Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895:
I wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.
For his novel, James devised a provocative premise: an attractive young woman with an entrancing improvisational style of oration is discovered one evening both by a wealthy feminist aiming to propel the movement into a blazing new era and by a chivalrous, conservative Southerner who, utterly charmed, soon realizes that he is falling in love with her—and wants nothing more than to thwart her potential blossoming as a brilliant prophetess of the women's cause. The attractions, repulsions, and agitations among these three archetypal characters lend palpable tension to a tale filled with psychological and social insight into one of the most significant eras in history, when the women of the world's preeminent democracy first articulated the collective demand that the two sexes be treated equally, both in law and in life.
Author Biography
Henry James, Jr., was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, the second of five children to Henry James, Sr., and Mary Walsh James. The elder Henry James adopted progressive viewpoints, such as the spiritual brand of utopian socialism expounded by the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and promoted them in books that never proved popular. He was nonetheless profoundly influential in the lives of his children, impressing upon them his acute moral consciousness and intellectual devotion. The oldest child, William, would become a renowned psychologist and philosopher; in William's shadow, the young Henry duly attuned himself to a mode of constant analysis and introspection, absorbing education under various circumstances as, after an early childhood in New York, his family moved around Europe between 1855 and 1860. Shy and taciturn, James had few childhood friends and, in his solitude, turned to books and the workings of his imagination, penning stories and dramas from an early age.
Returning to New England, James suffered at age eighteen an obscure trauma while helping put out a fire, a strain of sorts that he rarely and only vaguely referred to. He would suffer back pains at points in his life but otherwise remained active, and yet he evidently perceived the accident as justifying or legitimizing his isolation and estrangement from society. In light of the absence of evidence that James ever engaged in a romantic relationship (though he would have great love for his cousin Minny Temple, who was afflicted with consumption and died in 1870), some biographers have concluded that the accident affected his ability to perform sexually. Regardless of the actuality, the timing of the incident was itself significant: the Civil War was just getting under way, and while his younger brothers enthusiastically enlisted to fight for the Union, James lingered at home. Meanwhile, buoyed by the family's ample wealth, he strove to establish a literary career, publishing critical reviews and short stories beginning in 1864.
In time, James's restless mind and heart drifted away from his homeland.