The "Brilliant Careers" of "Terrible Creatures" in Henry James' The Bostonians and Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life

In a letter dated 11 June 1947, Susan B. Anthony's second cousin by marriage, Antoinette D. Lapham, recalled her impressions upon meeting Anthony for the first time: "In my era—I was born in 1861—papers caricatured all women who stood for women's rights, and I knew well her name and I considered them all terrible creatures; but I really think from that very first meeting, I would have served gladly under her banner, but first I must educate my men folks!"¹ The connection that Lapham makes between "caricature[s]," "women who stood for women's rights," "terrible creatures," and her own cousin testifies to the influences that literary and visual representations of female activists could have on young women in the late nineteenth century. Like Lapham, contemporary women's literature scholars appreciate these caricatures' impact. Coauthors Mary Chapman and Angela Mills have vigorously outlined creative tactics deployed by the American suffrage campaign: "From sensational publicity stunts to parades, pageants, and street theatre; feminist art and graphic propaganda in the form of cartoons, sandwich boards, banners, and advertisements; … popular literature and women's periodicals … [were] directed at converting men and women to the cause."² The anti-suffrage campaign deployed creative tactics that matched or exceeded those the suffragists deployed. Public caricatures depicting real-life and imagined women lecturers and activists circulated widely.

This article adds another voice to the role of such caricatures—that of novelists. Both Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913) and Henry James (1843–1916) published novels depicting female activists during Lapham's generation. Writing in the social and political milieu of the 1870s and 1880s, both Blake and James understood the stakes involved as they created their fictional women activists; developing such character types contributed tangibly and significantly to the suffrage debate. The activist figures imagined by artists and authors influenced real-life women, as Lapham's remarks testify. By juxtaposing Blake's Fettered for Life (1874) and James' The Bostonians (1885–86), this article also gestures to the even larger print culture within which these two novels existed: dedicated coverage of women's suffrage and feminist activism throughout the nineteenth century.

Today James and his writing may be better known than Blake and her work, but in the late nineteenth century she was no stranger to the literary world. Born in Raleigh and educated by Yale tutors in New Haven, she was a popular activist who often competed with Susan B. Anthony for appearances. Elizabeth Cady Stanton backed Blake to succeed Anthony in her 1900 presidential bid at the National American Woman Suffrage Association.³ When Fettered first appeared in March 1874, it was an instant success, selling thirteen hundred copies on its first day.⁴ In her lectures and her writing, Blake addressed issues including fashion, marriage, exercise, education, suffrage, careers, and equal pay. The author's private writing shows her just as concerned with the relationship between reform and moneymaking in her professional life as she was in her fiction. Similar to the novel's characters, Blake pursued both profit and reform during her activist days; her private writing shows meticulous records calculating her activist labor against monetary compensation. Frustrated with the popular debate that reform work and income couldn't coexist, Blake wrote in an 1883 diary entry that she was "invited everywhere to speak for nothing!" Her diary entry continues: "This ties me up. I do not like it. I do not like to offend my old friends, and cut all reforms, yet I need the money for the expenses of living."⁵ Her private writing and internal conflict about unpaid reform work reflect the intertextual debate between Fettered and James' Bostonians about the role of paid—and unpaid—women activists in the public imagination.

Blake's diary entry aligns with recent historical scholarship examining the public lectures of suffragists and contending that suffragists were businesswomen, entrepreneurs who pursued profit with calculation and acumen.⁶ Such research invites us to revisit both novels. Building on interpretations that have read the...