Anderson, Charles R. “James’s Portrait of the Southerner.” In On Henry James: The Best from American Literature, edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

Bell, Millicent. “The Determinate Plot: The Bostonians.” In Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Bell compares The Bostonians with other James novels and argues that it serves as an ironic rejection of naturalism.

Bowen, Janet Wolf. “Architectural Envy: A Figure Is Nothing Without a Setting in Henry James’s The Bostonians.” New England Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March, 1992): 3-23. By focusing on the architectural imagery of the novel, Bowen points out that the novel depicts conflicts between inner life and public persona.

Davis, Sara de Saussure. “Feminist Sources in The Bostonians.” In On Henry James: The Best from American Literature, edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

Faderman, Lillian. “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James.” New England Quarterly 51, no. 3 (September, 1978): 309-332. A feminist perspective on the novel that focuses on the contrasting treatment James gives to Verena’s relationships with Basil and with Olive.

Howe, Irving. Introduction to The Bostonians, by Henry James. New York: Modern Library, 1956.

Samuels, Charles. The Ambiguity of Henry James. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

Jacobson, Marcia. “Popular Fiction and Henry James’s Unpopular Bostonians.” Modern Philology 73, no. 3 (February, 1976): 264-275. Focuses on the novel as a political work and examines it in the context of the social and political consequences of the Civil War and the emerging women’s movement.

Wagenknecht, Edward. “Explorations: The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Tragic Muse; and Reverberater.” In The Novels of Henry James. New York: Felix Ungar, 1983. This chapter, in a book which provides general background on James’s life and works, places the novel in a biographical context.