The Typist's Remains: Theodora Bosanquet in Recent Fiction

Secretary; suffragist; incisive critic and parodist of Henry James; witness to and recorder of his death bed dictations; writer of one of the best memoirs about James; tireless psychical researcher who channeled a marvelously verbose James after his death, Theodora Bosanquet was a novel waiting to happen. This article analyzes Bosanquet's recent appearances in Michiel Heyns's The Typewriter's Tale (2005), Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation" (2008) and David Lodge's Author, Author (2004) to consider the ways in which the boom in novelizing James might be seen as intimately bound up with the compelling figure of the turn-of-the-century secretary.