For quite some time, the feminine features of the Jamesian aesthetic have offered a particularly fruitful point of entry into not only the historicity but also the organizational tactics of his fiction. Within these features, the abiding issues of ambivalence and of dialogical form (to my sense, the key characteristics of that fiction) may be given especially fresh expression. In recent years, this nexus of ideas and procedures has tended to be explored predominantly through queer theory, but Victoria Coulson has chosen to pursue it through contemporaneous notions of femininity, thereby enabling a more historicist account and also, I would suggest, an account that is more patient of the Jamesian enterprise. Her principal interest is not in James as such, but in the work of the three women with whom he had the closest relationships – Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Alice James – and in the mediation of gender and of fictional form that, taken together, produce sharper readings of their shared writerly situation. Coulson's argument (and it is a compelling one) yokes together Jamesian realism and femininity as shared sites of ambivalence towards the gender expectations of social and aesthetic authority. She makes the fine case that James's imaginative affiliations with women display across all four of her subjects the various forms of resistance to the authority of heterosexual definition: each of her female writers, in company with James himself, is socially conservative, yet each is also dissatisfied with the feminine roles ascribed by that conservatism and so becomes simultaneously compliant with and resistant to contemporary orthodoxies. It is within the tensions of this simultaneity that Coulson finds new understandings of ambivalence, and provides for that irritatingly evasive term “clarity of definition” (through its specific condition in early modernism) without reducing its resonance. She has a fine phrase for these tensions – a “restive conservatism” – which negotiates skilfully the trajectories of the shared patterns of resistance she identifies, a resistance marked off from the more straightforward strategies of rebellion (involving clean breakages with authority) by its entanglement with dominant ideological forms: resistance, she acknowledges acutely, always involves a recuperative capacity, never innocent of collaboration in one way or another.

Coulson proposes that the realist representation advanced by her writers is a clear textual correlative of this social “restive conservatism,” summarized wonderfully as a “representational mode structured by an insoluble tension between a loyalty towards semantic authority and a longing for semiotic independence” where they are “no more inclined to endorse authority than they feel able to repudiate it.” In the chapter on Woolson and her relationship with James, Coulson enfleshes these propositions with a brilliant attention to the domestic trope of the home as a means of picturing the ambivalence of their restiveness:

Caught up here are all the strands of the social, psychological, and aesthetic that Coulson deploys with enviable agility and shrewdness to make her case. A marvellously pliable prose enables her to figure ambivalence firmly without bruising its interstitial office – as she continues here, for example: “The ambivalent inhabitant buys shelter at the risk of entrapment, and freedom to leave at the price of never truly belonging.” Few of us are capable of such flexible density of style and argument (140).

Coulson's monograph is first-rate. There is absolutely no doubt that it makes a real difference to her subject. She is stunningly agile in complex argumentation, conceptually sophisticated (without ever falling prey to the drier reaches of theory), and marvellously acute and expressive on the textual details she analyses on behalf of her general thesis (the use of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a monologist to explain the dialogical nature of James's prose, for example, or the ceremonies of tea in Woolson and the “confidante” in James to illustrate the to-and-fro of their relationship). And there is a telling confidence in the way she is prepared to go about things, a confidence in assertions such as “Constance and Henry are always more authentically conventional than one might wish them to be, yet they are always less compliant than they at first appear,” where we sense the voice of a fine scholar who will extend her subject beyond the limits of mere research (126).