The Constant Listener: Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet (an Imagined Memoir) by Susan Herron Sibbet (review)

Readers of the Henry James Review will know Theodora Bosanquet as Henry James's secretary during the last nine years of his life and as the author of Henry James at Work (1924). The Constant Listener is an imagined memoir reconstructing Bosanquet's life with James from the archival material in the Bosanquet and James Collections at the Houghton Library, Harvard, among other sources. Bosanquet kept extensive diaries during her years with James. However, since some of the volumes were destroyed during the Nazi bombing of London, there are scenes in this sweet and sympathetic memoir/novel that are wholly made up. We are told in the footnotes that a scene set in 1924 of Bosanquet talking to Virginia Woolf about the Woolfs' Hogarth Press is a fiction because Bosanquet's diaries throughout the early 1920s are missing. This allows Sibbet (and her literary executor, amanuensis, friend, and posthumous co-author Lady Borton) to create an intriguing encounter between Bosanquet and Woolf when the two meet at Woolf's London home to discuss the publication of what would become Henry James at Work. Woolf confides to Bosanquet that the typesetting she does for the Hogarth Press is a form of therapy to help with her unstable mental health, a physical activity connected to her more cerebral passion, writing. According to The Constant Listener's Woolf, her previous doctors subscribed to the S. Weir Mitchell/"Yellow Wallpaper" rest cure mentality, believing that creative freedom was dangerous for the female brain, liable to make her "nervous and upset" (236). The press, Woolf tells Bosanquet, allows her to be physically active, so "she would not always be up there in her mind" (236).

By contrast, Bosanquet's dilemma, as laid out in this sometimes quaint, but always charming and richly imagined work, is that she was too up there in James's mind. Where is the room of one's own for the loyal secretary who also wants some creative [End Page E-8] and critical autonomy for herself? If Woolf is forced to draw back from writing and thinking into the soothingly repetitive physical work of printing, then Bosanquet's devotion to being James's amanuensis only rarely lets her be more than James's Hogarth Press, the mechanical reproducer of his words. In this same scene, Woolf shows herself to be much more interested in the great author than in his secretary:

tell me how he did it. What was his process? What made him write those great, intricate, opera-like novels, with all those voices simultaneously singing amazing sextets and octets like Mozart, individual voices, individual stories, destinies, ambitions, desires, each with its own line, distinct, and yet all braiding, weaving together? How did he do it?

(238)

(This makes James sound a little like he was writing The Waves, but it is supposed to be Woolf's projection of him.)

The Constant Listener dramatizes Bosanquet's devotion to her role in loving detail, from the moment she leaves Miss Petheridge's secretarial bureau to work for James in 1907 to her reading out James's deathbed dictations for a BBC broadcast in 1956, while helping Leon Edel with his biography. Bosanquet is depicted as fiercely loyal to James's legacy, although also aware of his occasional ridiculousness and his complexities. Attuned to the rhythms of James's language, she was both an incisive parodist and his biggest fan. The novel shows her winning a Westminster Review prize for a work written in the style of a famous author ("ten pounds to the winner, quite an inducement in those days" [198]). Bosanquet's send-up of James, "The Four Faces," took the grand prize. Her (actual) calendar diary annotation for June 12, 1915, records "H. J. expresses approval of Prize Essay—says it is good" (304). In the scene from the novel James pretends not to know who has written the parody and instead dictates an admiring...