Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  The revelation of Charlie’s torment and suicide plunged Constance into her first deep depression since her mother’s death. She told Sam she had never suffered so much in her life. Charlie’s death so far away had made her “perfectly desolate, &, for a time, it seemed to me that I cd. not rally from the depression it caused; & that it was hardly worth while to try.” Physically, she was also suffering from a series of painful ailments. She could hear her father’s voice telling her to “[k]eep a stiff upper lip.” Over time it began to drown out Charlie’s final cries. But it would take months for her to regain courage enough to face even the simplest of tasks.24

  The only known photograph of Charlie Woolson. His death shortly before his thirty-seventh birthday was devastating to Constance.

  (The Western Reserve Historical Society)

  After being paralyzed for weeks, unsure where to go next, she decided on London, arriving in October and planning to stay through the winter. She had long been drawn to its culture, history, literature, and landscape and had hoped she could spend part of every year there while she was abroad. But everyone seems to have discouraged her, worried that the dark, foggy days and cold, damp weather would be detrimental to her health and emotional state. Only Jane Carter was supportive, advising her to give it a try.25

  To her delight, London was warmer than Menton had been and the houses more properly heated. She enjoyed the homey comforts of England. And the darkness didn’t bother her; it was cold she feared. She was lucky. According to James, it was the “most beautiful winter I have known in England—fogless and frostless.” In the middle of January, the temperature rose into the fifties.26

  James had returned to London on the first of September, and his presence was probably another reason Woolson chose London. She had glimpsed a tenderness in his last letters and probably wondered if he could be a harbor in her emotional storm. There was no other friend in Europe just then she could turn to. She would not only give London a try, but James as well.

  Seeing the crisis she was in, he did not turn away. In fact, during the eight months she lived in London, the two friends saw each other often and began what would be one of the closest relationships for either of them outside of their families. So close was it that they would one day decide to destroy their letters to each other, hers from Venice being the last to have survived. We can only piece their friendship together now from fragmented, often veiled references in their letters to others.

  James told his good friend Lizzie Boott that if she came to London he could “make a place” for her, “in spite of the fact that Costanza has just arrived,” suggesting Constance occupied the principal place just then. Later that winter James wrote to Howells of Woolson, whom he claimed to see “at discreet intervals”: “She is a very intelligent woman, and understands when she is spoken to; a peculiarity I prize, as I find it more and more rare.” Only a few weeks earlier, Woolson had indicated to Sam that James visited her “now & then,” while her neighbor noted to John Hay that James came “frequently” to call on her.27

  Her neighbors were French Ensor Chadwick, naval attaché for the American Legation in London, and his wife, whom Constance had met in Florence (they were friends of the Hays and Goodriches). They had found her an apartment below theirs in Sloane Street, South Kensington, and were “kindness itself,” Constance informed Sam. “They have done everything they cd. think of to add to my comfort & keep me from too much loneliness.”28

  Unfortunately, though, it seems the Chadwicks were not able to help her recover from her depression. As she explained to Hay, whose health had also not been good, Chadwick was “one of the best fellows in the world,” but he couldn’t understand the kind of grief and illness she and Hay endured. “I really think that he believes I cd. have got better sooner, if I had only tried!” she complained. Hay understood, however, “the illness that hangs on, & baffles effort, & takes the heart out of a man.” Just as she had with Paul Hamilton Hayne many years before, she now found a companion in her depression, but Hay was far away. James was nearer and had a good deal of experience with depression, having witnessed his brother William’s battle with it in 1869–1870. He was no stranger to depressive episodes and was experiencing his own “pronounced state of melancholy” that winter after the deaths of his father and good friend Ivan Turgenev, the Russian writer.29 His younger brother Wilky, who, like Charlie, had failed to fulfill his early promise, was also declining rapidly.

  A letter James wrote a few months later to his friend Grace Norton indicates how much he understood the kind of psychic crisis Constance was experiencing. He told Grace, “You are not isolated, verily, in such states of feeling as this—that is, in the sense that you appear to make all the misery of mankind your own.” Like Constance, Grace was prone to absorb the suffering of others and question the value of a life so filled with pain. In response, James was determined to speak “with the voice of stoicism.” Even in the absence of religious faith, he believed, “we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup.” He had faith ultimately in the “illimitable power” of human consciousness. He begged Grace to “remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. . . . Sorrow comes in great waves . . . and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.”30

  Far from the uncomprehending admonition simply to get well that Chadwick had offered Woolson, James’s advice acknowledged the depth of his friend’s pain. So must he have conveyed to Woolson a solidarity in suffering that would have been immensely comforting at a time when she felt alone in the world. It was precisely what she needed to separate herself from Charlie’s troubles and find purpose again in her work—that “illimitable power” of consciousness that was the province of the writer. Yet, in her writing as well as in her life, she found it hard to let the troubles of others wash over her.

  By January Constance told Sam, “I have conquered, & got a firm hold of myself again.” She had fought her way back to “the interest I was full of last summer” and “the habit of daily work.” When Hay came over in May, he was pleased to report to his brother-in-law Sam that he and Constance had had many talks and that she was “busily engaged upon her new novel with all the energy of recovered health and spirits.” She relished the opportunity to discuss literature with Hay and welcomed him to the band of novelists. His anonymous novel The Bread-Winners, his first, had just finished its run in The Century. She had written to him in January, “I am terribly alone in my literary work. There seems to be no one for me to turn to. It is true that there are only two or three to whom I wd. turn!”31 James would soon become one.

  Less than a month later, James indicated that he was reading her work, writing to Howells that he was “the only English novelist I read (except Miss Woolson).” James was used to telling his novelist friends what he thought of their work. Many of them trembled to hear his opinions—“I am afraid I have a certain reputation for being censorious and cynical,” he wrote to the writer Mrs. Humphry Ward.32 Woolson, however, had often asked for frank criticism and found few who would provide it. Constructive criticism encouraged her to aim ever higher, as the Appletons’ review of Two Women had done. It is probably no coincidence that she began to write the most ambitious novel of her career as James began to read her work.

  During Hay’s visit in May, Woolson saw him often and finally had the chance to ask his advice on publishing matters. He urged her to request more money for the serial rights of her new novel, but she wasn’t sure she would dare to. King was also in London and had been for months. Woolson was disappointed he had not called on her. Finally he did. “One visit was all I required to revert comfortably to my old opinion of him,
—which was superlative,” she told Hay. But one visit was all she would have. She felt as if he had “dropped” her, she complained to Hay, who “comforted [her] by the disclosure that he had dropped, in the same easy way, two Duchesses and the Prince of Wales.”33

  During the spring, when she wasn’t writing she “prowl[ed] about this dear, dusky old town.” She found all of the sites associated with Thackeray and Dickens and enjoyed the galleries.34 In June, the Benedicts returned, this time with Kate Mather. Constance secured rooms on Portman Square near Hyde Park and found herself surrounded by young women—not only her two nieces, but also the Carter girls, Mary and Grace (with their mother, Jane), as well as Mary’s friend, Daisy, whose real name was Juliette Gordon Low (the future founder of the Girl Scouts).

  In July, while the others went to Germany, Constance moved just outside of London to Hampstead, a lovely, hilly town where she could enjoy cooler weather and get some work done high above the London smoke and smog. James visited her often there and wrote to Lizzie Boott that Woolson was “a most excellent reasonable woman, . . . I like and esteem her exceedingly.” He was impressed to find her so “absorbed in her work.”35

  Her stay in Hampstead was short, however. Her rooms were too small and damp, so she went back to London, where the summer heat soon overwhelmed her. James was in Dover just then, finding the quiet conducive to work. Constance decided to pack her bags and head for the white cliffs as well.36 This was the first of their many secret rendezvous. Neither mentioned the presence of the other in their letters. Unmarried as they both were, such meetings could invite scandal. Although James had come to Dover to work, he apparently didn’t mind having the hardworking Woolson there as well. They both understood that the other needed time to write and thus were settling into an easy companionship.

  Near the end of September, as James resettled in London, Woolson moved to the town of Salisbury, where she spent two blissful, solitary months finishing her new novel. Her time there was one of her happiest abroad. She had always “dream[ed] of spending a few weeks in an English Cathedral town.” Her landlord, one of the pulpit vergers, secured her a seat in the thirteenth-century cathedral’s choir. She often stayed after services to let the great organ’s rumbling tones wash over her.37

  Her mornings were spent hard at work in her rooms, which looked out over the garden and a beamed house “as old as Shakespeare’s time.” In the afternoons, she walked into the countryside in search of Norman or medieval churches. On her way home in the cool evenings, she enjoyed spying through glowing windows the cozy scenes of clergymen and their families busy with their tea.38 Then she happily returned to her rooms for her own tea and read or wrote letters by gaslight.

  On September 29, James came down from London, the first time he made a special trip to see her. The pair hired a carriage to take them to Stonehenge. Buffeted by a cold wind, they wandered underneath the towering stones in silence. On the way back to Salisbury, their carriage pulled off into a ditch, where they cowered for half an hour while the wind roared overhead. Back in her lodgings the two dined and then went to a local theater for a rendition of Richard Sheridan’s society farce A School for Scandal.39

  EAST ANGELS

  In January 1885, Woolson’s new novel began to appear in Harper’s magazine, running concurrently with Howells’s Indian Summer. She resented the fact, fearing his work would overshadow hers. East Angels was her longest novel at six hundred pages. It was, in fact, the longest novel published in Harper’s thirty-five-year history. Her decision to write a long work was motivated in part by economic need. It was becoming clear that she would have to produce a long novel every two to three years to support herself sufficiently. Her royalties in 1883 had been over $2,000 (nearly $50,000 in today’s money). By 1885, they were only $200 (about $5,000 today). Taking Hay’s advice, she had asked for a raise for the serialization of East Angels, requesting $3,500 (today, $87,500). The Harpers accepted her terms.40

  If Woolson had put all of her youthful self into Anne, she put all of her adult ambitions into East Angels. It is her most fully executed realist novel in its analysis of character and motivation. In East Angels, she tested her interest in the analytical novel. Some have noted this novel’s affinity to James’s works, despite its exotic Florida setting, and seen it as an answer to The Portrait of a Lady.41 Woolson had also drawn from one of his greatest influences, Ivan Turgenev, whose works she had grown to love. She learned from him, as James had, to let her plot grow organically from her characters. In writing East Angels, she wasn’t so much choosing sides in the literary debates then raging as she was experimenting with how far she could take the analytical mode. The result is a work that deserves to be read alongside James’s Portrait.

  The plot is easily told: a group of northerners settles near St. Augustine, and two of them—Margaret Harold and Evert Winthrop—fall in love. However, Margaret is married to Evert’s cousin, who has abandoned her, and she will not divorce him. James heartily approved of the work, writing, “[W]hat is most substantial to me in the book is the writer’s . . . general attitude of watching life, waiting upon it, and trying to catch it in the fact. . . . [A]rtistically, she has had a fruitful instinct in seeing the novel as a picture of the actual, of the characteristic—a study of human types and passions, of the evolution of personal relations.” While James had brilliantly dissected his characters’ consciousness, Woolson was after their hearts as well, believing the drama of inner life incomplete without a close examination of characters’ emotional states. She was, in a way, applying the new analytical method to the timeless themes of literature, those of the Greeks, Shakespeare, and the Romantics. After a long period in which the genuine expression of emotion had been highly valued, however, the late nineteenth century was becoming increasingly suspicious of it, even demanding its suppression. As the novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett put it in in 1883, “There is a fashion in emotions as in everything else. . . . And sentiment is ‘out’ ” as is “grief.” On the other hand, “making light of things” was in.42 East Angels, like so much of Woolson’s fiction, charts this transition from a Romantic world of feelings to a modern world of restraint. The shift away from the direct examination of emotions would in fact become central to the invention of modern literature, which would, following particularly in James’s footsteps, concern itself with inner consciousness.

  Woolson had reproved James for not showing readers whether his heroines truly loved. There had been no evidence in Isabel of the kind of “heart-breaking, insupportable, killing grief” that surely would have followed her discovery of Osmond’s perfidy, had she loved him. Almost as if Woolson were showing James how it could be done, she proceeded to portray, with the methods of a realist, the “killing grief” of a woman who loves deeply but silently. Much of the pathos of East Angels derives from the way its heroine, Margaret Harold, must constantly repress her emotions, as her era demands. What others perceive as Margaret’s coldness and self-righteousness is really a desperate attempt to maintain self-control. “We go through life,” she tells the younger Garda, “more than half of us—women, I mean—obliged always to conceal our real feelings.”43 While Garda refuses to guard her feelings, Margaret hides her face whenever she is near Evert Winthrop. She escapes his presence as quickly as she can. Like her creator, she seeks out solitude, particularly in nature, as the only safe place where she can drop her mask and allow her face to express the feelings within.

  Whether or not Margaret is right to hide her feelings and then to refuse to act on them when Winthrop forces them out of her is not the point of the book (although this would be the point on which critics fixated). The point is simply for the reader to understand Margaret and to empathize with her. While to other characters she is so “good,” particularly when she chooses to stay with her negligent, philandering husband, Woolson shows us the great strain and almost superhuman effort that goes into her self-sacrifice, exposing the costs of women’s inability to reveal their true selves. Once, near
the end, Margaret expresses bitterness about repressing her feelings. She challenges Winthrop, who is trying to lure her away: “You talk about freedom . . . what do you know of slavery? That is what I have been for years—a slave. Oh, to be somewhere! . . . anywhere where I can breathe and think as I please—as I really am! Do you want me to die without ever having been myself—my real self—for even one day?” Winthrop later asks her, “[D]o you wish to die without ever having lived?” He offers her love and life, but Margaret steadfastly refuses, viewing divorce as a great wrong (as Isabel Archer had). In the struggle between Winthrop and Margaret, he threatens to force her acquiescence by overpowering her, but she looks at him, her eyes “full of an indomitable refusal,” and tells him, “I shall never yield.”44 Maintaining her self-control is the only way she can maintain her self-worth.

  Writing East Angels drained Woolson physically and emotionally. After the serial version was finished, she wrote to Hay, “[O]ne novel takes my entire strength, & robs me of almost life itself! I am months-recovering.” Her writing process was remarkably arduous. She first wrote a detailed version of the entire plot, then a thorough description of each character, and finally exhaustive accounts of each scene with numerous pages of conversation, much of which never made it into the final book. In fact, all of this prewriting was many times longer than the actual book. To transform it into a coherent novel, she had to piece together the various parts, condense scenes and dialogue, and make them fit into the prescribed space allotted in each issue of the magazine. All of this could take up to two years. As she later explained to her niece Kate, “I don’t suppose any of you realize the amount of time and thought I give to each page of my novels; every character, every word of speech, and of description is thought of, literally, for years before it is written out for the final time. I do it over and over; and read it aloud to myself; and lie awake and think of it all night. It takes such entire possession of me that when, at last, a book is done, I am pretty nearly done myself.”45