Henry James' unborn women

Alice's shallower and vainer brothers

Daisy, Kate, Isabel, Catherine, Maria, Charlotte. Henry James' women (many from upstate New York, many possessing the means of imagination to write for the New York Review of Books, or to solo circumnavigate the oceans, or to dance with complete and intuitive appreciation for Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev) stand half-lost among the stars at the dawn of Modernism, yet too long before the challenges to governance and inheritance that took the form of blurring and then challenging gender-assignment roles, and in this way they portray themselves portraying themselves, never quite saying, held back from acting out, stillborn dreams of that thing that is sometimes called Post-Modernism (with which, I have no quarrel, for in that spinning weave of beauty and beast toil and sing those who implicitly believe in the Iroquois dreams or the Aboriginal dreamtime, though perhaps I am getting away from myself, after a fashion, teleporting myself into their company, those frozen elfs and stilled wraiths, the wisps of promise and might and wisdom that call themselves Daisy and Kate). Breath and blood essences out of time, crafted from the shapes of the night's clouds, perhaps even with some small measure of debt to Henry, and yearning to hear the "swing" of which oarsmen speak, yearning to feel the "souplesse" that cyclists seek, or yearning to complacently fix tea in the cabin of a canalboat driftsting and boobling along almost nameless canals in golden-gulled Provence. A commonplace for us to have learned: that instead, they hauled bolts of dust-catching cotton around like longshoremen, mummified themselves with scriptures of many make, and pickled themselves with the burps and poops of Alice's shallower and vainer brothers.
Until you get to Nicole Diver.