56). And while Olive Chancellor hopes and believes that she will never be like her frivolous sister, Mrs. Luna—who, like Mrs. Farinder, is “so personal, so narrow” (p. 153)—Basil Ransom finds Olive to be “intensely, fearfully, a person” (p. 87). Verena, too, discovers “how peculiarly her friend” Olive is “constituted, how nervous and serious... how personal, how exclusive” (p. 72). The words slip according to each character’s perceptions, blind spots, and feelings, and only through their interplay can we begin to make sense of James’s meaning.

In a letter to his friend Grace Norton, who was going through a difficult time in her life, James gave this advice: “Only don’t I beseech you generalize too much in these sympathies and tender-nesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can” (Selected Letters, p. 92). On the other hand, when Hugh Walpole, novelist and friend of James, quoted “The Master” in his diary, the sentiment expressed appears to be quite different: “I’ve had one great passion in my life‾the intellectual passion.... Make it your rule to encourage the impersonal interest as against the personal—but remember also that they are interdependent” (quoted in Edel, Henry James: A Life, p. 697). The two passages dramatize what I would call the focused ambiguity of James’s language. He begged Grace not to “generalize” or “melt” but rather to encourage in herself the particular, the personal, the fixed, and he advised Hugh to encourage the opposite, “the impersonal interest,” with the important caveat that he remember that the impersonal and the personal are always connected.

The apparent contradiction reveals Jamesian semantics. In each case, he is speaking to a particular friend, and his imparted wisdom reflects his understanding of each person’s psychological needs. James must have felt that Grace’s abstract effusions needed taming. On the other hand, he was giving Hugh paternal literary advice. In the world of James, there are no absolutes, no final truths, no static realities. The solidity he urges on Grace Norton is only a relative one. Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect. In The Bostonians Henry James turns the public and private inside out, and the engines behind that reversal are external and internal—a particular cultural atmosphere and sexual passion.

In terms of setting, the novel moves away from the “organised privacy” of Olive’s rooms at the beginning of the novel to a public building at its very end: Boston’s Music Hall, where Verena is scheduled to speak and where the story reaches its piercing crescendo. In between are scenes that take place in private, semi-private, and semipublic places. The second environment is Miss Peabody’s dim, drab, and “featureless” apartment where Mrs. Farrinder is supposed to address a gathering of the sympathetic (p. 27). The reader’s introduction to Miss Birdseye (a character all of New England took as a swipe at Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne’s sister and the novelist’s sister-in-law) has a comic pathos that well illustrates the novel’s worried strain between the general and the particular: “The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings.