TT: Her master’s voice

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Florida Stage’s regional premiere production of Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Theodora Bosanquet is one of those fascinatingly unimportant people privileged by chance to play a choice walk-on part in the history of literature. In 1896 Henry James developed a case of writer’s cramp so severe that he was forced to start dictating his novels to a typist, a practice that he continued to the end of his life. Bosanquet, the last of James’ secretaries, was a brisk, bright young woman with literary ambitions of her own (she became a critic) who published an illuminating memoir called “Henry James at Work” in which she told what it was like to take dictation from a great writer. While there was no question of her being romantically attracted to James–she appears to have preferred women–Bosanquet was clearly obsessed with him, so much so that she later claimed that he continued to dictate to her after he died.
So curious a creature could scarcely help but attract the posthumous attention of other writers of fiction, among them David Lodge and Cynthia Ozick. Now Michael Hollinger has joined their ranks, using Bosanquet’s obsession with James as the inspiration for a three-character play called “Ghost-Writer” that was first performed by Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company in September and has just received its regional premiere in West Palm Beach….
“Ghost-Writer” is set in Manhattan in 1919, and Bosanquet’s fictional counterpart is Myra Babbage (Kate Eastwood Norris), a typist who takes dictation from Franklin Woolsey (J. Fred Shiffman), a haughty, unhappily married novelist with a deeply buried romantic streak. Though the high-strung Myra has a beau of her own, she is a young woman of sensibility and so, not at all surprisingly, falls head over heels in love with Woolsey. The play begins shortly after his death, and we learn at the outset that Myra is fending off reporters. Why? Because it seems that Woolsey left behind the manuscript of an unfinished novel–and that Myra is finishing it, allegedly taking dictation from her deceased employer….
Those who are familiar with Henry James’ ghost stories will see at once that this is a quintessentially Jamesian situation, so much so that one wonders why it never occurred to him to write about it. It is no insult to Mr. Hollinger to say that his handling of the situation is more conventional than anything that James would have been likely to write. (The denouement of “Ghost-Writer” is, in fact, reminiscent of Somerset Maugham, a no-nonsense writer who had no use for James’ involuted ambiguities.) Still, that doesn’t keep him from spinning an absorbing tale, or from putting words into Myra’s mouth that are occasionally worthy of the master himself…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.