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they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art it creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means. I have lived with James’s characters and stories for many years and they do not leave me. They have become part of who I am, and I can’t help but feel that their creator, who worried over his paltry sales and lack of popularity with the reading public, would have been very happy to know how I feel. He would have been glad to know that his work has lasted and grown in importance, and that I am only one of many people who have been permanently altered by his books.
    In its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, The Bostonians is an embodiment of James’s nonprescriptive idea about what a novel should be. Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston. That city has changed, and the United States has changed, since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd thought, as well as ready-made opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.
    I believe it’s impossible to read The Bostonians without at least wondering about the ways we use language or language uses us. Moribund and idiotic political statements continue to influence and sway us because of the manner in which they are spoken or written. Even the most sincere declaration of devotion to a noble cause may be born from private venom or personal misery. There is always a gap between what we feel and what we say. Henry James knew that it was heartbreakingly difficult to capture the flux of experience in words, to articulate the riddle of human feelings and actions, but this was precisely his ambition, and I, as one of his faithful readers, love him for it.
    Siri Hustvedt earned a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College in 1977 and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1986. She has written a book of poetry, Reading to You; three novels: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and What I Loved; and a book of essays, Yonder. She has published numerous articles and essays on various subjects in the United States and Europe. What I Loved was short-listed for the Prix Étranger Femina in France, the Waterstone’s Literary Fiction Award in England, and the Barcelona Bookseller’s Prize in Spain; it won the Prix des Librairies du Quebec in Canada. A regular contributor to Modem Painters, she has written widely on art. Princeton University Architectural Press will publish a book of her essays on painting, Mysteries of the Rectangle, in spring 2005.

A Note on the Text
    The Bostonians is the most significant work by Henry James not included in the New York Edition (1907-1909) of his novels and stories, for which James provided extensive revisions of his best-loved books along with prefaces. First serialized in Century Magazine between February 1885 and February 1886, The Bostonians was published by Macmillan in book form on February 16, 1886. This three-volume edition, for which James made minor revisions, has served as the source for all subsequent impressions of the novel. One of James’s modifications to the novel between its serialization and its publication in volume form was to divide his narrative into three “Books.” Scholars have pointed out that either James or his printer may have mistakenly designated Chapter XIX as the first chapter of the second book. Though this chapter opens the second volume of the three-volume set, it is not a logical place to begin book two. (Indeed, for the one-volume edition