SOURCE: "The Bostonians and Henry James Sr.'s Crusade against Feminism and Free Love," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1988, pp. 323-42.

Habegger is the author of the full-length biography of James entitled The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (1994). In the following essay, he argues that Henry James, Jr. wrote his novel The Bostonians (1886) in reaction to his father's involvement with the free love movement and his encounters with the radical press.

There are some books that seem ugly, dull, and all wrong to contemporary readers and then strike a later generation as brilliant and right and presently get enrolled, in the canon of all-time greats. We generally trust that this sequence of events represents the triumph of taste over local prejudice—even for those books the local society would seem best situated to make sense of, realistic fiction. But what if someone wrote...