The Origins of the Novel

When he began writing The Bostonians, in the late summer of 1884, Henry James was forty-one years old. He had been living abroad since November 1875, first in Paris and then in London. His literary career to date had been founded on the ‘international’ theme, dealing with encounters between American and European characters and values: his first great success came with ‘Daisy Miller’ (1878), which takes its place amid a cluster of such works, among them Roderick Hudson and A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (both 1875), The American (1877), The Europeans (1878) and above all The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The publication of this novel confirmed James's status as a major modern novelist, and his regular journalism, criticism and travel writing (Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; French Poets and Novelists, 1878; A Little Tour in France, 1884) seemed to indicate that he had found his ‘vein’ and would stick to it. The Bostonians marks a sharp swerve out of this track, a swerve that James did not, however, anticipate or deliberately design.

The Bostonians is the fruit of James's two return visits to the United States in 1881–2 and 1882–3, but when he set out he had no intention of making literary capital out of these trips. He sailed from London to Boston in October 1881, staying first with his parents in Quincy Street, Cambridge, then at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston. On 25 November he recorded in his journal a rejection of his ‘home’ country and his embrace of the ‘old world’: