Theodora Bosanquet, Virginia Woolf, and the Missing Women

Perhaps because academic Jamesians focus, in studies of James’s reception in the first two decades following his death, on constructions of James within a then virtually all-male academy, important responses to James by women who were not academics—notably Theodora Bosanquet and Virginia Woolf—have shrunk into the background of discussions of James’s critical reputation during the interwar years. A just assessment of responses to James in the years following his death would feature, not de-emphasize, these “missing women,” whose commentaries on James have proved far more valuable than the oft-discussed work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington.