The Bostonians
A young woman with a gift for public speaking is claimed by two people: a Boston reformer who wants her for the cause, and a Southern conservative who wants her for himself. James sets the novel among abolitionists, spiritualists and journalists, and is unsparing about all of them.
It is the most political of his novels and one of the least liked in his own lifetime. The satire of reform is sharp, but so is the portrait of a man who mistakes possessiveness for love. The ending is deliberately unhappy and deliberately unresolved.
Public-domain status
First published in 1886. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry James died in 1916, so this work has been free to republish there since 1987.
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