Rejected and neglected when published in 1886, The Bostonians has now taken its place as the culminating novel of James's middle period. The harshness of its reception was natural. It satirized the cranks and charlatans of the post-Civil-War era; its hero was a Southerner; and in its portrayal of the relations of its two leading female characters it skirted a subject then taboo —the theme of sexual abnormality. Today the story of the contest between Olive Chancellor, the arch-feminist, and Basil Ransom, the Southern traditionalist, as to which shall mold and dominate the beautiful, guileless Verena Tarrant has come to be recognized as perhaps the most enjoyable of all the James novels.