Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) is set…

Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) is set in the era of the rising feminist movement.

James was born in New York City into a wealthy family.

His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America.

In his youth, James had traveled back and forth between Europe and America, studying with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, and Bonn.

At the age of nineteen, he had briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law.

James had published his first short story, A Tragedy of Error, at age twenty-one, and devoted himself to literature.

In 1866–69 and 1871–72 he had been a contributor to The Nation and Atlantic Monthly.

From an early age, James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature, and Russian classics in translation.

He had written his first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), while traveling through Venice and Paris.

After living in Paris, where he was a contributor to the New York Tribune, James had moved to England in 1876, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex.

During his first years in Europe James writes novels that portray Americans living abroad.

James’s complex novels probe the subtleties of his character’s temperaments and motives.

Among his masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879); in which the eponymous protagonist, the young and innocent American Daisy Miller, finds her values in conflict with European sophistication; and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which a young American woman finds that her upbringing has ill prepared her against two scheming American expatriates during her travels in Europe.