"Her Smoking Was the Least of Her Freedoms": Henrietta Reubell, Miss Barrace, and the Queer Milieu of Henry James's Paris

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.