Henry James

Henry James, The Bostonians

In the decade after the Civil War, a cynical southern lawyer gets sucked into a role-confused, quasi-love triangle with his liberal Bostonian cousin and a rising star in the burgeoning women's rights movement. It's 1875 and Basil Ransom, a young lawyer from Mississippi, receives an invitation from his free-thinking cousin, Olive Chancellor, to come visit her in Boston. He does not realize how much Olive has changed since he last saw her, or that she has become (what we would now call) a feminist, deeply committed to the liberation of women in a society in which they are still largely held in thrall to male relatives. So, not surprisingly, when Basil arrives she immediately takes him to one of her suffragette meetings. The speaker is a woman named Verena Tarrant. She is attractive and magnetic, while seemingly not all that aware that she is either, and both Basil and Olive find themselves enchanted by her.