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"Her Smoking Was the Least of Her Freedoms": Henrietta Reubell, Miss Barrace, and the Queer Milieu of Henry James's Paris
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 33, Number 3, Fall 2012
- pp. 247-254
- 10.1353/hjr.2012.0027
- Article
- Additional Information
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Although biographers have portrayed Henry James's Franco-American friend Henrietta Reubell (c. 1839-1924) as a passive female confidante, Reubell's role in James's career is arguably more significant and transgressive, as her Paris salon created a consequential queer cultural space. Along with other historical sources, James's portrayal of the heavy smoker Miss Barrace in The Ambassadors hints at her sexual unconventionality and encodes her as a keeper of erotic secrets and illicit knowledge, shedding light on Reubell's historical role as a bohemian art hostess, a generation before Gertrude Stein, as well as on her significance for James.