Constance Fenimore Woolson (March 5, 1840 – January 24, 1894) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. She was a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, and is best known for fictions about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and American expatriates in Europe.
Woolson's father died in 1869. The following year she began to publish fiction and essays in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. Her first full-length publication was a children's book, The Old Stone House (1873). In 1875 she published her first volume of short stories, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches, based on her experiences in the Great Lakes region, especially Mackinac Island.
From 1873 to 1879 Woolson spent winters with her mother in St. Augustine, Florida. During these visits she traveled widely in the South which gave her material for her next collection of short stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). After her mother's death in 1879, Woolson went to Europe, staying at a succession of hotels in England, France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.
Woolson published her first novel Anne in 1880, followed by three others: East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889) and Horace Chase (1894). In 1883 she published the novella For the Major, a story of the postwar South that has become one of her most respected fictions. In the winter of 1889–1890 she traveled to Egypt and Greece, which resulted in a collection of travel sketches,[2]Mentone, Cairo and Corfu (published posthumously in 1896).
In 1893 Woolson rented an elegant apartment in the Palazzo Orio Semitecolo Benzon on the Grand Canal of Venice. Suffering from influenza and depression, she either jumped or fell to her death from a fourth story window in the apartment in January 1894, surviving for about an hour after the fall. She was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and is memorialized by Anne's Tablet on Mackinac Island, Michigan,[3] and a niche with a slender silver trumpet vase in Christ Church in Cooperstown, New York.
Two volumes of her short stories appeared after her death: The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896).
Selected works
Selected works of Constance Fenimore Woolson were printed (and reprinted) in several volumes of family biography by Woolson's niece, Clare Benedict. Five Generations: 1785-1923 is the general title for three volumes published in 1930: Voices Out of the Past (Vol. 1), Constance Fenimore Woolson (Vol. 2), and The Benedicts Abroad (Vol. 3). Benedict then reprinted the second volume of the series, Constance Fenimore Woolson, in 1932 and added selected published and unpublished materials in "Appendix A." In this reference section, the four volumes Benedict edited are referred to by "Benedict," the volume number, and "(1932)".[4]
Novels
The Old Stone House, 1873. (Under pseudonym Anne March.)
Woolson's short stories have long been regarded as pioneering examples of local color or regionalism.[108] Today, Woolson's novels, short stories, poetry, and travelogues are studied and taught from a range of scholarly and critical perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic, gender studies,[109]postcolonial, and new historicism.[110]
In recent decades, critical work on Woolson has blossomed and teaching of Woolson at the high school and university levels has increased. Sharon L. Dean's The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson,[111] was published in 2012. Anne Boyd Rioux's Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist,[112] published in 2016, is the first full-length biography of Woolson. The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society holds regular conferences and hosts panels at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association and the biennial Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference.
Friendship with Henry James
The relationship between the two writers has prompted much speculation by biographers, especially Lyndall Gordon in her 1998 book, A Private Life of Henry James. Woolson's most famous story, Miss Grief, has been read as a fictionalization of their friendship, though she had not yet met James when she wrote it. Recent novels such as Emma Tennant'sFelony (2002), David Lodge's Author, Author (2004), Colm Toibin'sThe Master (2004), and Elizabeth Maguire's The Open Door (2008) have treated the still unclear relationship between Woolson and James.[113]
^Appletons' Journal 7 (March 9, 1872): 273. Rpt. New York Evangelist 61:42 (October 16, 1890): 6; Benedict 2: 83-85; in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 1993: 393-394.
^Old and New 5 (January 1872): 61. Reprint. Benedict 4 (1932): 427.
^Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture. 31:35 (May 25, 1872): 4; The Galaxy 13 (June 1872): 816. Reprint. Benedict 4 (1932): 426; Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, edited by Paula Bennett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
^Appletons' Journal 8 (October 12, 1872): 413. Reprint. Benedict 1: 190; Benedict 4 (1932): 429; in The Anthology of Western Reserve Literature, edited by David R. Anderson and Gladys Haddad. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1992.
^The New York Evening Mail, September 14, 1872: 1.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 45 (October 1872): 753. Reprint. The Chautauquan 18:1 (October 1893): 122.
^Appletons' Journal 11 (March 21, 1874): 372. Reprint. Saturday Evening Post 53:37 (April 11, 1874): 3; Benedict 1: 235; Benedict 4 (1932): 463; in American Anthology, edited by Edmund Stedman. Boston, MA: Riverside, 1900: 460-461; in The Home Book of Verse, edited by Burton Stevenson. Boston: Henry Holt, 1953.
^The Galaxy 18 (October 1874): 482-483. Reprint. Benedict 1: 232; Benedict 4 (1932): 458-59; in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 1993. Vol. 2: 394-95; in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, edited by Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 2004.
^Appletons' Journal 2 n.s. (January 1877): 60-67; 2 n.s. (February 1877): 140-147. Reprint. New York: Appleton and Company, 1877, 1885, 1890, 1893; Alexandria, VA: Chadwick-Healey, 1996; She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Janet Gray. Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P, 1997.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 68 (January 1884): 216. Reprint. New York Evangelist 55:4 (January 24, 1884): 6; Benedict 2: 178; Benedict 4 (1932): 178; in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, edited by Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 2004.
^Holograph in American War Ballads and Lyrics. New York: Putnam, 1889. Reprint. Benedict 3: 224-25.
^Benedict 4 (1932): 417. Reprint. In Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, edited by Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 2004.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 45 (September 1872): 518-33. Rpt. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives. Ed. Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 50 (December 1874): 1-25 (Part I); 50 (January 1875): 165-85 (Part II). Rpt. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives. Ed. Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 50 (April 1875): 617-36.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 52 (December 1875): 1-24.
^Picturesque America. Ed. William Cullen Bryant. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1876. 1: 393-411.
^Picturesque America. Ed. William Cullen Bryant. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1876. 1: 279-91.
^ Picturesque America. Ed. William Cullen Bryant. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1876. 1: 510-49. Partial rpt. "The Spirit of the Lakes." The Mentor 8 (October 1920): 34.
^ Picturesque America. Ed. William Cullen Bryant. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1876. 2: 146-167.
^Harper's New Monthly Magazine 52 (January 1876): 161-79.
^Christian Union 22: 9 (September 1, 1880): 165-66.
^The Christian Union 24 (July 27, 1881): 76-77. Rpt. Benedict 2: 247-56; Benedict 4 (1932): 247-56.
^Kern, John Dwight. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934.
^See, for example: Sharon L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995; Cheryl B. Torsney, Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989; Joan Weimer, ed. and intro. Women Artists, Women Exiles: 'Miss Grief' and Other Stories. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988; and Kristin Comment, "Lesbian 'Impossibilities' of Miss Grief's 'Armour.'" Constance Fenimore Woolson's Nineteenth Century: Essays. Ed. Victoria Brehm. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2001. 207-23.
^See for instance: Kathleen Diffley, ed. Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011; Anne E. Boyd, "Tourism, Imperialism, and Hybridity in the Reconstruction South: Woolson's Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches." Southern Literary Journal 43.2 (Spring 2011): 12-31; and Neill Matheson, "Constance Fenimore Woolson's Anthropology of Desire." Legacy 26.1 (2009): 48-68.
^Sharon L. Dean, ed. The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2012.
^Rioux, Anne Boyd. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Norton, 2016.
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