Who Is Mrs. Ada T.P. Foat? And Why
Should Historians Care?:Ê An Historical
Reading of Henry James' The Bostonians

John McClymer
Assumption College

Henry James' The Bostonians is one of the most celebrated novels of Gilded Age America. As he wrote in his notebooks, it sprang from his desire to write an "American" tale, one dealing with what he took to be the most "characteristic" movement of the time, the "agitation" for woman's rights. Literary scholars have produced a vast literature dealing with the novel.1 Historians have largely ignored it.2 In this essay I seek to demonstrate two points. The first is that historians can, by grounding the novel in its historical context, provide insights into the work that have eluded literary scholars. The second is that The Bostonians proves a highly useful source for the historian into both the "agitation" for woman's rights and the largely unexplored role – the fascination with Victoria Woodhull and the Beecher-Tilton trial aside –  Spiritualism played in that "agitation" and in the Gilded Age more generally.3	1
Almost exactly half way through The Bostonians, Basil Ransom gets to spend a few hours alone with Verena Tarrant. It is a crucial moment in the rivalry between Ransom, a penniless Mississippian seeking to make his way as an attorney in post-Civil War New York, and his Boston-born and -bred cousin Olive Chancellor for the heart – and soul – of Verena. He has called at the home of her parents. While waiting for her to come down to the parlor, he "possessed himself, according to his wont, of the nearest book. . .and spent ten minutes turning it over. It was a biography of Mrs. Ada T.P. Foat, the celebrated trance-lecturer, and was embellished by a portrait representing the lady with a surprised expression and innumerable ringlets."	2
After reading a few pages, Ransom "threw it back upon the table" with a gesture of contempt as he wondered to himself "whether this was the sort of thing Miss Tarrant had been brought up on" (1006). Ransom knows the answer to his own question for, on the occasion of their first meeting, she was introduced to the company as "the daughter of Doctor Tarrant, the mesmeric healer" (848). On that evening Verena spoke at a gathering of "reformers" and feminists. Or, as Verena's father, the roguish Dr. Selah Tarrant, explained, a "voice" spoke through her (851). Verena was, when Ransom first met her, herself a "trance lecturer." Her hope, much encouraged by her father, was to be another Mrs. Ada T.P. Foat with whom, James informs the reader, Mrs. Tarrant suspected her husband had had a sexual "association."	3
. . .