Theodora Bosanquet

Theodora Bosanquet MBE (3 October 1880 – 1 June 1961) was a writer, reviewer, editor, secretary, and amanuensis to Henry James. as well as being a contributor to, and subsequently director and literary editor of, the political and literary magazine Time and Tide. Her memoir, Henry James at Work is viewed today as "a pioneer work of critical biography".

Early life Theodora Bosanquet was born on 3 October 1880 at Sandown, Isle of Wight She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, one of England's earliest educational institutions for women, founded in 1853. Bosanquet was an admirer of James's work, and had been introduced to his writings as a pre-teenager. A week after she had started in the role, James wrote to his brother William to describe:a new excellent amanuensis... a young boyish Miss Bosanquet, who is worth all the other (females) that I have had put together... There is no comparison! With the arrival of William James's wife and daughter, however, she and others were kept away from James.

Post-war years In 1920, Bosanquet became Secretary to the International Federation of University Women (IFUW), an organisation formed the year before "to promote international understanding and friendship between university women around the world". a post she held for eight years, before being appointed to the board of directors, on which she remained until 1958. Bosanquet's writing Wedgwood described as "distinguished by a breadth of knowledge, a fine precision of writing, a balanced judgement and a quiet humour". of which she had been a longtime member. following which she was cremated. Her ashes were interred in the grave of her mother and brother at Uplyme, Devon.

In 1973, the Theodora Bosanquet Bursary for Women Graduates was founded in her memory, providing assistance to women scholars or postgraduate students undertaking research in history or English literature.

In recent years, more note has been paid to Bosanquet's invaluable assistance in helping to transcribe and select Henry James's correspondence for the preparation of Leon Edel's The Letters of Henry James. She has also increasingly been viewed not merely as James's amanuensis, but as his "creative counterpoint" and "closest literary associate". A 2007 edition of Henry James at Work, edited by Lyall H. Powers:... rescues Bosanquet from the shadows of literary history and shows her to be a fascinating figure in her own right, a skilled writer and editor, an early feminist, and a contemporary of the Bloomsbury literary community. Reviewers of the work noted its revelation of Bosanquet as a woman of intellection "as fully engaged in the life of ideas and cultural production as her male counterparts, making as much of her putatively secondary status as she possibly could."

There have also been multiple fictional depictions of her life and work alongside James, including Author, Author (2004), The Typewriter’s Tale (2005), Dictation (2008) and The Constant Listener: Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet (2017).

An entry for Theodora Bosanquet was added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in September 2022.