Even his brother William chided Henry for creating a “portrait from life” in basing the character of Miss Birdseye on the veteran abolitionist Elizabeth Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister-in-law. Many found James’s portrait of his two main characters, a Boston feminist and her young protégé, scandalously close to the well-known “Boston marriage” of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett (although James’s biographers claim he drew more from observing his sister Alice’s relationship with Katharine Loring). Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of The Century, was reportedly alarmed to find his subscribers falling away. In his novels of the late 1880s- The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse, and The Princess Casamassima-James turned to political topics for the first time and soon discovered that his readers did not follow. The American edition appeared a month later. Scrambling to recover his losses, James had his English publisher, Macmillan & Co., bring out the first edition in London on February 15, 1886. It first appeared in thirteen installments in The Century magazine (February 1885–February 1886), but by the time of the last installment James’s American publisher, James R. The Bostonians proved one of the most troubling of Henry James’s publishing efforts.
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