She would reform the solar system if she could get hold of it.” But here is James, speaking in his own voice, of Olive Chancellor: Her own sister says of her: “A radical? She’s a female Jacobin-she’s a nihilist. The great struggle for the abolition of slavery having been won, she is now-still a reformer-a passionate feminist. He has fought for the Confederacy and lost everything-the war, his wealth, home, plantation, slaves, friends, relatives-while his third cousin Olive has conveniently retained her fortune and, if her blood is not absolutely the bluest, is one of Boston’s leading philanthropic heiresses. Ransom is a Southerner, from Mississippi. The scene is the early 1870’s, just after the end of Reconstruction in the South (and shortly after the period in which James still lived in the Boston-Cambridge area). Ransom is a cousin of Olive Chancellor, the second of the novel’s dominant triad and its most sharply delineated figure, and he has been invited to visit her on Charles Street in her native Boston. Thus Basil Ransom, one of the three major protagonists-and certainly the conqueror-of Henry James’s The Bostonians, which has just reached the screen in one of the most singularly perverse adaptations of a classic I have ever encountered.
The whole generation is womanized the masculine tone is passing out of the world it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.
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