The storyline concerns the struggle between Ransom and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics.

[2] When Mississippi lawyer and Confederate Civil War veteran, Basil Ransom, visits his affluent cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston, she reluctantly takes him to a political meeting where Verena Tarrant delivers a feminist speech.

As Olive prepares Verena to become a platform speaker in the cause of feminism and the liberation of women from male domination, she accepts an invitation to speak in New York to a gathering of fashionable women from Mrs. Burrage, an immensely rich society woman whose son, Henry, had courted Verena in Boston when he was a student at Harvard College, courted her and been rejected.

When Olive learns that Verena had requested Basil's invitation and that, back in Boston, she had received a letter from him, she begins to fear that he will take her young protegée away.

Though she despises men and wants to hold onto Verena, Olive gives serious thought to supporting Mrs. Burrage's proposal after she leaves her house.

During their walk Basil expounded on his belief that women should not be granted suffrage and legal equality to men because their proper sphere is within the home as a wife and mother.

Attracted by his manner and personality, but appalled by his views, Verena leaves him and falls into Olive's arms, begging in tears that they immediately quit New York and return to Boston.

When Basil shows up, he tells Verena that he finally feels able to ask her to marry him because, with the imminent publication an article setting forth his conservative views, he now believes he has a future he can share with her.

Despite the presence of a policeman guarding the door back stage, Basil is able to enter and persuade Verena to elope with him, to the distress of Olive and her fellow-feminists.

Unlike much of James' work, The Bostonians deals with explicitly political themes: feminism and the general role of women in society.

James was at best ambivalent about the feminist movement: he wrote to a suffragette friend on April 6, 1909: "I confess I am not eager for the avènement of a multitudinous & overwhelming female electorate—& don't see how any man in his senses can be.

The title refers, not to the people of Boston in general, but to the two characters Olive and Verena, "as they appeared to the mind of Ransom, the southerner, and outsider, looking at them from New York".

Darrel Abel observes that when the novel was first published in Century Magazine in 1885, the people of Boston were very displeased: The Bostonians resented its satire upon their intellectual and humanitary aspirations.

Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his annotation: "It is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians.

[11] Some later critics, though uncomfortable with what they think the novel's rather static nature and perhaps excessive length, have found more to praise in James' account of the contest for Verena and his description of the wider background of feminism and other reform movements.

[18] Vanessa Redgrave's performance received high marks, however, as well as nominations for the 1984 Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Actress.