This absorbing book tells the story of Henry James' friendships with Minnie Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Minnie inspired James to create the characters of Isabel Archer, the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, and of Milly Theale, the heroine of The Wings of the Dove.

Both Minnie and Constance looked to James for more than he was prepared to give. He drew them into communion, then left them exposed when he withdrew into the sanctuary of his writing. Minnie died of tuberculosis in 1870 at the age of 25, after James rejected her pleas for a closer relationship; her consequent loss of morale accelerated her death. After fifteen years of friendship with James, Constance killed herself in 1894 at the age of 52. Their tragic deaths spurred his creativity.

James' greatest achievements depended on their generosity: the idea of the solitary genius is just a myth: genius cannot emerge in a void. He paid them the supreme artistic tribute of portraying them forever as heroines, but he paid them too little attention as real women. He rejected what few but he knew that they offered. He understood the claims that they made on life, but would not, could not, meet them. James' visionary moralism was born of his 'merciless clairvoyance'.

These two wonderful independent-minded women provoked James' creative attention; they figured for him creative possibilities that he celebrated in his greatest fiction. They enabled him to understand a woman's point of view, a perspective that became central to his art. Like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, James exposed the social corruption and moral bankruptcy of the bourgeois men and women of his time. But only James and Eliot, with Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch and Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, created heroines who transcended the limits of their society. In each of these novels, the heroine's integrity and altruism rise above the bullying interference and interests of others.

Constance Fenimore Woolson, a close friend of Henry James, earned his respect and that of many of her contemporaries. She was one of the most highly-regarded American women writers of her day. Sadly, she is still woefully overlooked by literary scholars today. She deserves attention as a pioneering realist and regionalist as well as a writer exploring complex issues of gender, race, region, and ethncity. These stories exhibit the breadth of her literary abilities and interests, including stories about the Great Lakes region, the South, and Europe. Her woman artist stories are particularly noteworthy. She explores what it was like to be a serious woman author/artist in the nineteenth century, combating men's prejudices and women's own guilt and fears about treading on a male realm. These stories alone make her one of the most important women writers of the nineteenth century, in my view. And her relationship with Henry James, in the context of which these artist stories can be read, make her all the more fascinating to us today!