If James was moved to write The Portrait of a Lady by his vivid mental picture of a heroine looking for the plot which would reveal her destiny, his next novel, The Bostonians, has at its hollow centre a girl whose fate is to be a screen onto which the fantasies of others can be projected. Verena Tarrant is that very American phenomenon, a star, and like the later stars of the cinema her rôle is to compensate for the frustrations and failures of her admirers by embodying their dreams. Her real self, if she has one, is located at the point where rival dreams intersect.

The novel is built round a series of images of Verena as she appears through the eyes of sceptical or seduced beholders. It is no accident that the first of these pairs of eyes belongs to the most sceptical, because the most dispassionate, observer of all, shrewd, laconic little Doctor Prance who declares at the outset of the novel that she doesn't want anyone to tell her what a lady can do. Her rapid, devastating summing-up of Verena is delivered at a point when the reader, like Basil Ransom, has merely glimpsed ‘the young lady with red hair – the pretty one’ among Miss Birdseye's grotesque and ageing guests: