'"Don't you care for human progress?" Miss Chancellor went on. "I don't know - I never saw any. Are you going to show me some?"' In The Bostonians, Henry James tackled one of the burning issues of his day - 'the woman question'. The story centres on the struggle between Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer, and Olive Chancellor, a wealthy feminist, for exclusive possession of the beautiful Verena Tarrant. One of the most humorous and most vibrant of James's novels, The Bostonians is, as Richard Lansdown says, also one of his most contentious: 'In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old.'