Verrena is more open-hearted and vibrant and innocent than Olive, but she’s also blessed with tremendous skill as an orator: she’s able to make people feel the rightness of her cause in a way that Olive can’t. The book centers around three characters: Olive Chanceller, a fierce young Bostonian who is really into feminist causes Verrena Tarrant, an ingenue who falls into Olive’s orbit and Basil Ransom, Olive’s cousin from Mississippi. But The Bostonians presents a truer and less romantic picture of a man whose love–and he is, unquestionably, in love–does not redeem him. The thing that made Pride and Prejudice so wonderful was that Darcy’s love for Elizabeth vitiated his bad qualities and allowed the good in him to win out. I’ve read some really gory and awful books ( The Naked Lunch and I Was Dora Suarez being amongst the worst), but I’ve rarely read a book as upsetting as this Henry James book I just finished: The Bostonians. Nor have I read a character who I hated as much as its male lead: Basil Ransom.
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