1. James, Henry, “A New England Winter,” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Edel, Leon (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), vol. 6, pp. 93–97Google Scholar. Subsequent references to the tale will be included in the text.

2. James's letter to J. R. Osgood outlining his proposed “new novel” dates from April, 1883, but he only began to work on the as yet unnamed book in August, 1884; in his notebook he confessed to being “infinitely oppressed and depressed by the sense of being behindhand with the novel-that is, with the start of it” (The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Edel, Leon and Powers, Lyall [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], pp. 18, 30)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The first installment of The Bostonians appeared in Century Magazine in 02, 1885.Google Scholar

3. James, Henry, Letters, ed. Edel, Leon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 53.Google Scholar

4. Letters, vol. 3, pp. 75–76.Google Scholar

5. Letters (1975), vol. 2, p. 267.Google Scholar

6. Several critics have written at length about James's indebtedness to, and kinship with, Balzac. Two recent titles are Stowe, William, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Tintner, Adeline, The Book World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987).Google Scholar

7. James, Henry, “Honoré de Balzac,” in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Edel, Leon and Wilson, Mark (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 43, 58.Google Scholar

8. James, , “Balzac,” pp. 61–62.Google Scholar

9. James, , “Balzac,” p. 62.Google Scholar

10. Auchincloss, Louis, Reading Henry James (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), p. 75.Google Scholar

11. James, Henry, The Bostonians (New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1956), p. 464Google Scholar. Subsequent references to the novel will be included in the text.

12. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary gives support to Faderman, Lillian's observation (Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present [New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981], pp. 19–20)Google Scholar that the writings of turn-of-the-century medical experts, of “sexologists,” were instrumental in redefining, and making suspect, strong friendships between women. “Lesbian” and “Lesbianism”-meaning sexual intimacy between women-began to gain currency in the 1890s. The OED's first citation for “lesbian” meaning homosexual is from an 1890 medical dictionary, the second from an 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis; “lesbic” appears in another medical dictionary of 1892. While “lesbianism” is cited from an 1870 diary entry reporting on a conversation with Algernon Swinburne, and then from an Alfred Douglas letter of 1895, the first citation from a contemporaneous printed source is from Havelock Ellis's 1897 Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which notes that “Casanova remarked that the women of Provence are especially inclined to lesbianism.” For a convincing discussion of Willa Cather (who belonged to a succeeding generation, one aware of the spreading notion “that women's friendship constituted a special category not sanctioned by the dominant culture”) as a “lesbian writer,” see O'Brien, Sharon's biography, Willa Cather, The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 117–46.Google Scholar

13. Tintner, , The Book World of Henry James, pp. 261–66.Google Scholar

14. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 26.Google Scholar

15. Notebooks, pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

16. Notebooks, p. 19.Google Scholar

17. Notebooks, p. 20.Google Scholar

18. Although Judith Fetterly thinks Verena behaves masochistically, she acknowledges that “Verena yields to Ransom mainly because it is he alone who is capable of arousing her sexually” (The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], p. 150)Google Scholar. Jacobson, Maria says flatly: “Verena responds finally to Ransom's sexuality” (Henry James and the Mass Market [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983], p. 37).Google Scholar

19. Faderman, , Surpassing the Love of Men, p. 190.Google Scholar

20. Edel, Leon, ed., The Diary of Alice James (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 13.Google Scholar

21. Strouse, Jean, Alice James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980), pp. 246, 248, 250.Google Scholar

22. Strouse, , Alice James, p. 200.Google Scholar

23. Strouse, , Alice Adams, p. 24.Google Scholar

24. Letters, vol. 3, pp. 368, 374.Google Scholar

25. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 58.Google Scholar

26. Smith-Rosenberg, , Disorderly Conduct, p. 74.Google Scholar

27. Faderman, , Surpassing the Love of Men, p. 195Google Scholar. To bolster her argument that Henry James was uneasy about the relationship between Alice and Katherine, and that this unease would surface in The Bostonians, Strouse notes that William James's “wife suspected Alice and Katherine of being lovers-though she confessed the thought only to William” (Alice James, p. 201)Google Scholar. As evidence for this assertion, Strouse refers to Gay Wilson Allen's 1967 biography of William James. There, in a single sentence, Allen says, “To William's Alice the relationship looked suspiciously Lesbian, but everyone was grateful for Alice's improvement” (Allen, Gay Wilson, William James [New York: Viking, 1967], p. 227).Google Scholar

Allen, however, did not have firm evidence of such suspicion; he was relying on notes and summaries of the correspondence of William James and Alice Gibbens James provided by their younger son William (“Billy”) and by a grandson, John S. R. James. He was denied direct access to the correspondence because it had been deposited in Harvard's Houghton Library under severe restrictions-to be lifted only in 2022, a hundred years after Alice's death. Mr. Allen has written me that “from these summaries I got the impression that Alice's sister-in-law thought there was an abnormal sexual relation between Alice and Katherine Loring” (Letter of May 19, 1988).

Quite recently, the restrictions on Alice Gibbens James's letters to her husband have been lifted. Only some of the letters that Alice wrote William during a long lifetime have survived, but among those remaining are nearly two dozen written in the winter of 1882–83-while her husband was traveling in Europe, and while her father-in-law was dying in Boston. (Allen's comment about the Alice-Katherine relationship occurs in the context of a discussion of William's reaction to the deaths of his parents, both in 1882.) These letters do reveal a certain amount of tension between the two Alices: it is clear that at times Alice, the wife, felt that Katherine was too prominent a feature in the James household. The tension, however, and Alice's sense that Katherine didn't always know her place, were consequences of the unusual circumstances of the old man's dying. Henry James, Sr., effectually, if happily, starved himself to death-while four women watched over him in the close quarters of the house on Mount Vernon Street. None of his four sons was there; Henry arrived from London several days too late. The daughter Alice and Catherine Walsh, the maternal “Aunt Kate” who had been a part of the household since the marriage of her sister to the dying patriarch, were residents there. Constantly in and out of the house were the daughter-in-law and the other Katherine. In the daughter-in-law's eyes, the other Alice and Katherine were antipathetic to Aunt Kate. On December 21, three days after the death of her father-in-law, Alice Gibbens James wrote William that Alice “has used [Aunt Kate] very ill,” and that “Katherine adds to the complication. She is painfully pronounced in the family, but no one is perfect and she means well, I am sure.” The next day she wrote: “I think she [Alice] rules Katherine as well as everybody else and Katherine has caught much of Alice's imperativeness of speech and manner. They neither of them have any mercy for Aunt Kate, though I am sure Miss Loring is not aware of how she pushes her aside.”

While a prurient-minded 20th-century reader with sharply dichotomous vision might find in Alice's letters to her husband glimmerings of a “Lesbian” connection between Katherine Loring and the sister Alice, there is little evidence that Alice the wife harbored such suspicions. In a letter of December 22, after telling William, “Don”t think I have been falling out with either of them,” she says: “for your dear parents' sakes I want to always be, and keep near enough to Alice to be a sister to her if she wants me. I am finally sure of this: she is not made as other women, — our ways of feeling are not hers so we have no right to decide.” On December 27, after reporting that she and Henry had talked of Alice, “her future and the extraordinary tie between her and Katherine,” she predicted that “for some time to come she and Katherine will order their lives to the same measure, and the future is still too distant to think about, — the future, I mean, where they may weary of one another.” But then she immediately added: “Just at present Alice is at Beverly [Katherine's home], much better for the change.” On New Year's Day she reported: “Miss Loring who appeared just before lunch is again the easy discreet person of old times.” Then, five days later, she wrote about an afternoon visit to Mount Vernon Street when her sister-in-law was ill in bed, “ministered to by Miss Loring.” The fire was burning on the hearth, “but the feeling of strangeness was dreary enough.” Katherine was in the room, setting the furniture in order, and Alice the wife was “afraid she would see in my eyes how painful the sight of her was to them, just then and there, so I scampered away. Of course it must be so, and Alice has a deep right to arrange her life to suit her own wants. But it is too sad that she and Aunt Kate cannot live together.”

William's Alice was not always happy about the friendship shared by her sister-in-law and Katherine Loring, but her letters to William do not permit us to infer that she thought that friendship “Lesbian.” She was at times resentful of Katherine, but her resentment sprang from her sense that Katherine had displaced Aunt Kate.

28. Hendin, Josephine, Introduction to The Bostonians (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. x.Google Scholar

29. Vann Woodward, C., The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 126–40Google Scholar; and Hendin, Introduction.

30. Significantly, Olive's two brothers have died in the war, thus bequeathing to her the money that enables her to maintain her comfortable household and to further her feminist crusade. It is also, perhaps, significant that James's youngest brother, Wilkie, who had been severely wounded in the war, had died, in Milwaukee, in November, 1883 – after James had proposed his novel to Osgood, but before he began work on it. In the proposal, Verena's “lover” is not from the South; he arrives in Boston after “spending ten years in the West” (Notebooks, p. 19)Google Scholar. By this time, the unfortunate career of the third brother, Robertson, who had also been wounded in the war and who had also tried his luck in Milwaukee, was increasingly apparent. The two younger brothers had been wartime heroes, but they were not heroic survivors.

31. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 40.Google Scholar

32. Quoted in Taylor, W. R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961), p. 171.Google Scholar

33. Gilbert, and Gubar, , The War of the Words, p. 27.Google Scholar

34. James knew quite well one woman who had maintained such a friendship after marriage. Sarah Butler Wister, whom James met in Rome in 1873 and with whom he corresponded for decades afterward, is one of the women prominent in Smith-Rosenberg's discussion of 19th-century female friendships. When James met her, she had been married several years, but her friendship, “intense, loving, and openly avowed,” with Jeannie Field Musgrave continued to flourish: “Sarah's marriage altered neither the frequency of their correspondence nor their desire to be together.… Although at first they may have wondered how her marriage would affect the relationship, their affection remained unabated throughout their lives, underscored by their loneliness and their desire to be together” (Smith-Rosenberg, , Disorderly Conduct, p. 56).Google Scholar