Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Throughout the lengthy, painstaking process, she also poured her emotional life into her work. “Nothing is true or effective which is not drawn from the heart or experience of the writer,” she wrote in a journal she titled “Mottoes, Maxims, & Reflections.” When asked to respond to a debate about whether or not writers must be moved to tears in order to similarly move their readers, Woolson responded affirmatively, citing “the account of the way George Eliot’s books ‘ploughed into her’ [and] the description of Tourguenieff . . . as pale, feverish, so changed that he looked like a dying man, because the personages of one of his tales had taken such possession of him that he was unable to sleep.”46

  While she was writing East Angels, a pitiful tone entered into her letters, not unlike Winthrop’s words to Margaret during one of their final meetings: we “have nothing—[we] are parched and lonely and starved.” In the summer that she began working on the book, she claimed to be “mournful, and lonely.” In January, as she returned to work after her illness, she was again “lonely, & not much entertained with the spectacle of daily life.” Despite the visits of Clara, her two nieces, and the Carters, she felt increasingly as if her circle of family and friends was narrowing.47 She openly envied those with spouses and children and began portraying herself as starved for affection and human interest. It was as if Margaret’s fate and her own were entwined.

  Writing East Angels had also made Woolson homesick for Florida. She declared to Hay, “[T]here is not a twig, or flower, described in ‘East Angels’ that is not literally ‘from life.’ ” She would move back tomorrow if she could get a small house in St. Augustine.48 When the widower of her old St. Augustine friend Mrs. Washington told her he was saving six acres twenty miles south of the city for her, she called it “East Angels” and began making vague plans to build a cottage and retire there in ten years or so.

  The publication of George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, which Woolson read not long after she finished East Angels, revived her feelings of loneliness and resentment toward those who basked in an atmosphere of love and devotion. While in London she had learned all about Eliot and Lewes’s marriage in practice if not in fact (he was unable to divorce his wife) and her feelings about her old idol had changed. She did not begrudge Eliot the right to live with Lewes, but she was clearly jealous of the steadfast love they shared: “[S]he had one of the easiest, most indulged and ‘petted’ lives that I have ever known or heard of. . . . True, she earned the money for two, and she worked very hard. But how many, many women would be glad to do the same through all of their lives if their reward was such a devoted love as that!” What Woolson objected to was “that after getting and having to the full all she craved, then she began to pose as a teacher for others! She began to preach the virtues she had not for one moment practised in her own life.”49 Woolson could not be accused of any such hypocrisy. She practiced the virtue of self-renunciation as vigorously as Margaret Harold did. And she feared she would one day die, like Margaret, without having fully lived.

  MEETING ALICE

  After a dismally cold winter in Vienna with the Benedicts, Constance returned to England, moving this time to the Isle of Wight. She was relieved to be back in England, but a week after her arrival she was struck with a “troublesome affection of the nerve of the spine” that she blamed on writing too much. She could not use her hands at all. She became anxious and depressed and confessed to Mary Carter that she broke down and cried at times.50

  Woolson had this photograph taken while she was staying in Leamington and unable to write.

  (The Western Reserve Historical Society)

  The saline baths of Leamington, where she soon moved with Clara and Clare, relieved her pain, but she still could not write much. The three made excursions in the vicinity to places like Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford, with which she immediately fell in love. After her sister and niece sailed home in September, Constance occupied herself by strolling through the lush gardens of nearby Warwick Castle and reading English memoirs and biographies. England felt like home, yet she was thoroughly worn out and irritable. Finally she consulted Dr. Eardley Wilmot, whose treatment, which probably utilized the Leamington spa waters, enabled her to start writing again.51 She was desperate to get back to work; the Harpers were awaiting the book revisions of East Angels.

  Although Woolson had earlier planned to spend the winter in Venice or Florence, she headed to London, returning to her old lodgings in Portman Square. James may have suggested the move. He was a mile away in Piccadilly. He gave her a copy of The Bostonians that winter and introduced her to his sister, Alice, and her companion, Katharine Loring, who lived five minutes from him.52 For years Alice had struggled to maintain her mental and physical health. She had stayed at asylums, received electrotherapy treatments, sought out renowned doctors in New York, and traveled to Europe in hopes of improving her condition. With both parents now dead and Henry and Katharine devoted to her care, she made a new home for herself, primarily in London and later in Leamington.

  The apparent cause of Alice’s suffering was the struggle between her fierce will and the great effort to suppress her intense feelings, the precise conflict Woolson had described in her character Margaret Harold, who also fell ill when her emotions got the better of her. Alice thought of herself as “an emotional volcano within, with the outward reverberation of a mouse and the physical significance of a chip of lead pencil.” Her oldest brother, William, called her “bottled lightning.”53 Alice and Constance were in some ways twins under the skin. The great difference between them was that Constance had found a vocation and an outlet for her emotions, while Alice was effectively silenced by her overbearing father and highly accomplished two older brothers. In 1889, three years after meeting Constance, Alice would begin to find her voice by writing the diary that would be her life’s great work.

  Alice James, Henry James’s sister, whom Woolson came to know in London, during the winter of 1885–86.

  (Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. and Other Family Papers, MS Am 1094 [2247, f.44.4], by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  In the winter of 1885–1886 Constance quickly became “[o]ne of Alice’s preferred new friends.” However, they were also rivals for Henry’s attention. Alice’s jealousy toward her brothers’ female friends could be severe. When William announced his engagement in 1878, Alice took to her bed for months, “on the verge of insanity and suicide,” as her father put it. In the case of Henry’s relationship with Constance, Alice complained to family members of his “flirting” and “galavanting [sic]” with her. In the years ahead, Constance would be careful to downplay the closeness of her relationship with Henry. In one letter, the only one she wrote to Alice that has survived (and only in fragments), she makes sure to point out that the letter she has just received from Henry, who was ill in Venice, was only “a few scribbled lines,” lest Alice feel aggrieved at not having heard from him herself.54 Nonetheless, frequent notes were exchanged between the two friends in the coming years, and Woolson would also develop a warm relationship with Katharine Loring.

  That winter, the day after Christmas, Woolson received a note from Henry James informing her of the death of Clover Adams, wife of Henry Adams and close friend of the Hays. She had been a witty, intelligent woman—a “perfect Voltaire in petticoats,” in James’s words—who had found few opportunities for intellectual stimulation. Upon hearing the news, Woolson immediately wrote to the Hays, describing Clover’s death as “sudden.” Although the exact cause of her death was a well-guarded secret, James learned of it afterward and surely passed the news on to Constance. Clover had swallowed photo-processing chemicals, unable to recover from the death of her father and, as James said, “succumb[ing] to hereditary melancholy.”55 It must have reminded Woolson of her brother’s suicide. It was also another instance of the “killing griefs” that could rob one of the will to live.

  The winter was inauspicious in other ways as w
ell. London was experiencing rampant unemployment that led to riots. One day in February, Woolson was caught up in a mob making its way down Piccadilly. She escaped unharmed, but the unrest lasted for days. In the dark, cold days of winter, “ ‘Babylon’ seemed doomed.”56

  Nonetheless she lingered into the spring to finish the book revisions of East Angels, allowing herself to spread out beyond the confinements of its serialized form and perfecting its language. The magazine version of her novels never satisfied her. Only as a book could the novel be realized as she had imagined it. When she finally finished, at the beginning of April, with her eyes, hand, and back completely worn out, she departed for Florence, the city of rebirth.

  PART FOUR

  The Bellosguardo Years

  1886–1889

  “And now, for the moment, the wheel seems to have turned round completely. . . . After seventeen years of wandering, I have at last a home of my own. . . . I am supremely happy.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  “I was prepared to like [Henry James] from Miss Woolson’s description of him and his great kindness and attention to her when she was ill.”

  —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

  10

  Home Found

  WHEN WOOLSON returned to Italy in April 1886, she put the exhausting work on the book revisions of East Angels behind her. As her train made its way out of the snow-covered mountains of Switzerland and into Italy, she felt her old longing for life in all of its vividness return. The soothing greenery she had left behind in England could not compete with the visual symphony of painted houses and blue sky that serenaded her in Italy. Stopping for two days in Venice and floating in a gondola along the Grand Canal, she “felt compensated for all [her] years of toil.”1

  Her respite was short-lived, however. As soon as she arrived in Florence at her old pension, the Casa Molini, she was greeted with a telegram from Harper & Brothers, telling her that the manuscript she had so carefully prepared was feared lost. The ship carrying it, the Oregon, had collided with another vessel. Without even unpacking her trunks, she wrote nonstop for two weeks, fourteen hours a day. When she finally finished the new manuscript and mailed it, she received a cable telling her that the original had survived after all. Nonetheless, after all the extra work, she felt like a hostage set free. But if she had been exhausted before, she was on the verge of collapse now.2

  The writer’s cramp that had stymied her progress on the book in England was now plaguing her right arm and back. Some writers hired others to help them with their manuscripts. James had a “typewriter”—a person, not a machine—who typed clean copies of his works. However, Woolson, ever careful of her finances, was working entirely on her own, writing each copy by hand.3 The excessive exertion was beginning to cripple her.

  Fortunately, she found relief in Florence, under the care of a new physician, an American named William Wilberforce Baldwin, whom she had first met in Venice in 1883. Over the next two decades, as his fame grew, he would count among his patients Edith Wharton, J. P. Morgan, William Waldorf Astor, Queen Victoria and her daughter Mary, as well as Henry, William, and Alice James. Baldwin would also become one of Woolson’s closest friends in Europe. His first treatment involved electrotherapy, which helped. Unfortunately, the relief would last only as long as her respite from writing did. Perhaps more important, she had finally found a doctor who seemed to intuit what she needed after two years of what she felt were incompetent English doctors. Baldwin was famous for empathizing with his patients and listening undividedly to them. He diagnosed the whole patient and understood that not all physical ailments had a tangible cause. He would confirm for Woolson what she had known all along—that the body and the mind were inextricably linked.4 He would one day become an important ally in her battles against depression. For now he was also a valuable friend who loved to talk about literature as well as medicine.

  Free of work, Woolson revisited “one by one, and at [her] leisure, all [her] favorite pictures, statues, churches, and places.” She was “such an old resident” of Florence now that she didn’t even need her Baedeker.5 She tried to avoid Florentine society this time around, but she didn’t have her writing as an excuse for refusing invitations. Instead, she begged off for health reasons and often stayed in her rooms, reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, newly available in French translations.

  A COMMUNITY OF ARTISTS

  James was worried that Woolson’s return to Italy would increase her isolation. Although she knew many people from her earlier stay in Florence, he was aware that her deafness made socializing awkward for her. She needed a good friend, like him, who would sit with her and talk into her ear trumpet, which made conversation easier. He had just the man for her, someone who needed her as much as she needed him—his dear old friend Francis Boott, an American composer who had lived in the Villa Castellani on the hill of Bellosguardo, outside of Florence, for nearly forty years. James had known Boott and his daughter, Lizzie, since his post–Civil War years in Newport. Their close filial relationship inspired his creation of the bond between Osmond and Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady. By introducing Woolson to the Bootts, James was also providing a companion for Boott to help fill the void left by his daughter’s recent marriage.

  In May, James sent off the letter that would change the lives of his two lonely friends: “I wonder, my dear good Francis, whether you will do me rather a favour,” he began. “My excellent and amiable friend Constance Fenimore Woolson is in Florence, and I want to pay her your compliment and administer to her some social comfort.” Aware that a bachelor introducing an unmarried woman to a widower could be interpreted as having an ulterior motive, he clarified: “though she has not made any sort of request of me touching this proposal (by which I don’t mean that I want you to ‘propose’ to her, either for me or for yourself), I am sure the sight of you would give her joy. She is a deaf and méticuleuse old maid—but she is also an excellent and sympathetic being. If Lizzie could take a look at her and attract her to the villa I should be very glad.”6 With this simple letter began the happiest period of Woolson’s life since her childhood home had broken up after her father’s death. The family to which James introduced her would fulfill her need for connection and companionship more fully than her relationship with James, whom she saw only at random intervals. Her friendship with them would also cement the two writers’ bond through these mutual friends.

  The fatherly Francis Boott appears to have called at the Casa Molini as soon as he received James’s letter, and shortly afterward Woolson made the trip up to the Villa Castellani, where she also met Lizzie and her new husband, Frank Duveneck, both of whom were artists. The three were so taken with Woolson that they encouraged her to sublease an apartment in the villa, below Miss Louisa Greenough (related to Francis through marriage), whom she knew well from her earlier stay in Florence. Woolson wasn’t sure she measured up to the current tenant’s idea for a suitable replacement. She tried her best to fit in. “How I wore my best clothes every day; spoke in a whisper; held myself in as ‘distinguished’ a manner as I could; & pretended that I had 6 or 8 villas at home,” she wrote to Sam. Fortunately, she “ ‘passed,’ & got in!” Woolson thrilled at the thought of living across the courtyard from her new friends. She envisioned them painting in their garden and herself writing in her own, with the heavenly view laid out below her.7

  Woolson moved into her new apartment in September, after spending the hot summer months in Geneva, where she barely touched her pen and rested as completely as she could. At the Villa Castellani, she continued to recuperate, writing very few letters. In the evenings, she opened up the doors to the garden, allowing the strong fragrance from the abundance of flowers to fill the room. By the light of the moon she could see the outline of the Villa Montauto’s crenellated tower. Hawthorne had stayed there in 1858, and now, during the day, she could watch its shadow move across her garden. She was so delighted with her new residence that she feared “it was almost wickedness!”8 />
  Woolson was so content, in fact, that she didn’t want to leave Bellosguardo when her sublease expired on January 1. It seemed like fate when she heard that the second floor of the nearby Villa Brichieri would become available in December. Although she had been perennially wary of settling down anywhere, due to the expense and responsibilities of keeping a home, it seemed as if the perfect situation had presented itself. The comparatively small villa stood perched at the brow of the hill, looking down on the domes and campaniles of Florence. For five hundred dollars a year, she could have nine partially furnished rooms and a terrace with a view that took her breath away. To Woolson, for whom a beautiful view was “everything,” this was paradise.9

  The Villa Brichieri was only about two hundred years old, so it didn’t boast a chapel, a ghost, or the mysteriously expansive underground cellars and tunnels of the five-hundred-year-old Villa Castellani. But she could manage the expense, she thought. After selling the last of her father’s lands in Wisconsin for $1,000, she had given the money to Samuel Mather to invest for her at 6 to 7 percent. She had hoped to hang on to the land and sell it someday for enough money to buy a home in Florida, but her dreams were shattered by the reality of the slow real estate market. By selling, she could take the interest she earned to help finance a home in Italy. She signed a lease on the Villa Brichieri for a year, with an option to renew under the same terms. She hoped to be able to write a new novel there. “I am looking forward to a year of great tranquility, comfort, & hard work,” she wrote to Sam. “Heretofore I have often had the last named, without the other two.”10