Miss Birdseye is a delightful character in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. Or let’s say the elderly activist and irrepressible humanitarian would be delightful if she weren’t so vividly and painfully real. I have known Miss Birdseye in various young and old incarnations, and perhaps you have too. The problem with this woman is that she is fundamentally decent. She is just so blind to human nature. She is lost, astray in her grandiose fantasies of rescuing the dispossessed and fanatically prejudiced against her own people. Here is a description of her early in the book:

She was a little old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom noticed – the vast, fair, protruberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for with unsuccesful irrelevant movements. She had a soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague in some kind of dissolvent. The long practice of philanthrophy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details…..

She struck him as very poor, but it was only afterward that he learned she had never had a penny in her life. No one had any idea how she lived; whenever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage.

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