Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  On the subject of East Angels’ artistic merits, reviewers also disagreed. The New York Times applauded it as “the work of a most accomplished artist,” and The Literary World thought it her best work, full of the fine workmanship of For the Major and “a remarkable power of observation that we are always conscious of” in her work. The Independent captured the book’s essential accomplishment: “The art with which Miss Woolson has, as it were, suppressed Mrs. Harold, hidden her resolution, her passion, her sensibility, and kept her subordinate, to bring her forward at length as the great creation and study of the book—this is masterly.” Other critics, however, felt she had ventured too far into the territory of the analytical novel, sounding a note similar to that taken in response to James’s fiction. East Angels was “singularly lacking in the definiteness of plot which should characterize so long a story” and was flooded with “minute and painstaking character studies.” The “effect on the reader” was “drowsiness,” the perennially ill-disposed Nation grumbled. Despite having seen such great promise in Anne, Horace Scudder at the Atlantic had found it little realized in For the Major and even less fulfilled in East Angels. Why could she not use her considerable “power,” he asked, “in some swiftly accomplished tale, where the quickness of movement will save her from undue subtlety of motive?”31 Yet James was on her side at last, and so she weathered the American criticism, resting secure in his high opinion of her.

  AURORA LEIGH’S VIEW

  As the new year arrived, James went down to join Boott and the Duvenecks in Florence, leaving Woolson to take possession of her new villa. The Villa Brichieri was not perfect—it was rough and rather empty feeling—but it more than fulfilled her desire for a home of her own. It was the first place she had settled into since her father had died seventeen years earlier. She could not contain her joy. She was “so tired of a wandering life” that she quickly decided the villa was “the greatest success” of her life. Her high spirits overflowed. After “seventeen years of wandering” and “much sorrow; & pain; & toil,” she had found “peace & joy unlimited.” “[T]he wheel seems to have turned round completely,” she wrote to Stedman. She was “supremely happy.”32

  Woolson was convinced she had “as lovely a view as the world contains.” Rather than try to describe its beauty, she told her correspondents to take out their copies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and turn to the following passage:

  I found a house, at Florence, on the hill

  Of Bellosguardo. ’Tis a tower that keeps

  A post of double-observation o’er

  The valley of Arno (holding as a hand

  The outspread city) straight toward Fiesole

  And Mount Morello and the setting sun,—

  The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,

  . . .

  No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseen

  By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve

  Were magnified before us in the pure

  Illimitable space and pause of sky.33

  How fitting that one of the earliest nineteenth-century works to confront the difficulty for women of combining romantic relationships with a commitment to the creation of literary art should be set, in part, at Woolson’s new villa. In these surroundings, Woolson would again contemplate the mystery of so many women’s lives—how to love and maintain a separate identity—all the while enjoying periods of her own perfect solitude.

  Her writing room, where she spent the majority of her solitary hours, was the “the best place I have ever had for working,” she wrote to Sam.34 A cook and a maid—Angelo and Assunta—made the villa less lonely. Angelo was a wonder. He could prepare anything she wanted and serve it perfectly. He was over fifty and practically “a Yankee,” able to make repairs throughout the house. She paid him ten dollars a month and was thought generous. The elderly Assunta kissed her hand each morning and at night before going to bed. “All goes like clockwork,” she was happy to say, “and I have no care at all.”35

  The view today from Woolson’s terrace at the Villa Brichieri, Bellosguardo, outside of Florence, Italy.

  (Photograph by the author)

  But she could not feel entirely settled. She was an American, she told herself. Italy was not her home. The Bootts had all of their lives felt torn between the blissful Bellosguardo and their family back in Boston. Woolson drew a clear line in her mind between “home” and Europe, longing to settle finally in St. Augustine. Her dream would be complete, she told Mary Carter, with a summer cottage near Mary’s new home outside Cooperstown.36

  Moving back to the United States would be much more expensive than staying in Italy, however. She would have to save up for it. And a new, sparsely furnished home in Italy that required her to buy carpets, stoves, curtains, furniture, linens, and flatware was not getting her any closer to her goal. The initial outlay after moving into the Villa Brichieri had left her feeling rather poor, in fact, so she asked Sam to wire her some of her savings. She knew he would not approve of her drawing on her reserves, “[b]ut if you could know, Sam, the intense pleasure & comfort this delightful home is to me—you would, I think, agree with me in feeling that it was a wise step. Every morning as I look at the beautiful view while dressing, I thank God for the delight of it. . . . [E]very day I am more content than I was the day before.” She would not return to Florida, she insisted, until she could afford her own home there. Now that she had one abroad, she realized how essential it was. Her health, and her ability to keep writing, depended upon it.37

  11

  Confrère

  WHEN JAMES’S essay “Miss Woolson” appeared in the February 12, 1887, issue of Harper’s Weekly, a full-page, folio-sized portrait of Woolson graced the cover of the magazine. It marked the culmination of years of worry over the idea of her portrait appearing in print. In Florence in 1883, Mrs. Howells had urged her to allow her brother, the sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead, to make a medallion portrait of her to complete his set of famous authors, comprising Howells, James, and Hay. Woolson expressed to both James and Hay her feelings on the subject: “I do not at all think that because a woman happens to write a little, her face, or her personality in any way, becomes the property of the public.”1

  Mrs. Howells argued that “[w]hen the Harpers want your portrait, to put in the magazine—as of course they will—it will be all ready.” When Mead also suggested that portraits of American authors belonged on the Washington Monument, then nearing completion in the nation’s capital, Woolson felt as if she were living “a sort of night-mare.”2

  In late 1885, when the Harpers first asked for her portrait, she turned to Hay: “As you may imagine, it is a pang to every nerve in my body, to be produced in public in that way; they say that I should not be able to suppress a likeness altogether, since there is a fancy at present for bringing out ‘series’ of ‘authors’ likenesses;’ & a photograph of some sort is sure to be obtained of everybody, somewhere; & the thing done whether the victim likes it or not. Therefore how much better to have a good likeness brought out in a proper place. Such is the argument.” Woolson knew the craze for writers’ photographs well because she had participated in it herself, as a consumer. Her collection included a portrait of Stedman cut from a magazine and a velvet triptych frame containing a poetical Hay, a smiling Howells, and a cynical James. But, she felt, “there’s no ‘proper place’ for an ugly woman!”3

  When her portrait first appeared in Harper’s, in the March 1886 issue, she was happy to report that it looked nothing like her. Another representation that didn’t look much like her—more like a boy than a grown woman—was a bust created after an 1887 illness in which she had lost much of her hair. She wrote at length about it to her nephew: “Sam, do’nt you think you could lend me your nose? Richard Greenough, the Sculptor, who has been here [at Bellosguardo] lately (he lives in Rome) has formally asked permission to ‘do’ my head,—again reducing me to the embarrassed & vexed state of mind which the subject of ‘a likeness’ always produces.
Why have’nt I a nose? It would be such a pleasure to decline modestly; & then be forced into consenting; & then have a lovely bust in marble to send you. Your [step]mother, now, might lend me her profile. I have declined Mr Greenough’s proposal—with thanks. I shall never sit to anyone—painter, sculptor, or photographer, again.”4 But the requests kept coming, and she was unable to hold them off.

  Used to expressing her deepest feelings behind the mask of fiction, Woolson had erroneously believed that she could simply remain hidden. She desired fame for her writings but not celebrity for herself. It had come to her nonetheless. She was now, as a Cleveland paper remarked, “the world’s property.”5 She could, however, as the Harpers suggested, control her image, limiting, in effect, the public’s access to it. The portrait that accompanied James’s essay about her was a calculated attempt to satisfy the public’s cravings and thwart them at the same time. Rather than allow readers full access to her face, she deliberately turned away from the camera. Her body faces the viewer partially, but her head looks away. Her eyes are downcast, as if she has only reluctantly submitted to the intrusion. Her hair is pulled back into a braided coil. Her curls have been tamed, cut short and tightly framing her face. A neckband hides her throat, and a delicate lace cape conceals her bust. It is hard to imagine a more conservative portrait of the woman author. Look at me if you will, it seems to say to the viewer, but you will see only what I am prepared to reveal. Not coincidentally, the accompanying essay by Henry James sends substantially the same message.

  Portrait of Woolson used for the etching in Harper’s Weekly, February 12, 1887, which took up the entire folio-sized cover of the paper.

  (Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. and Other Family Papers, MS Am 1094 [2245, f.58], by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  JAMES’S “MISS WOOLSON”

  In writing his essay “Miss Woolson,” James confronted the many complications of Woolson’s personal and public lives, not to mention his relationship with her.6 He would have to figure out a way to do her justice as the private woman he had come to know and as the author who had become the “world’s property.” It was also a test of their friendship, for he had picked up the critic’s pen, which, as Woolson knew well, could draw blood.

  Author interviews and profiles had become incredibly popular in Britain and America, and it was inevitable that the Harpers would want one of the widely admired Woolson. Surely the Harpers asked James to write it because he had recently written two similar essays for Harper’s Weekly: one of his friend Howells and another of the artist Edwin A. Abbey, both accompanied by portraits.7 Considering how nearby Woolson was when he wrote the essay, she must have approved of the plan. Unfortunately, her feelings about the piece and the additional publicity it would thrust upon her have not survived. She probably accepted that someone would write a profile of her eventually and it was better to control the circumstances under which it was produced.

  But could she? Although it was her friend who was writing the essay, she must also have feared his underlying disdain for women writers. He would, in fact, a few short weeks after penning the essay, write in his notebook venomously about the “scribbling, publishing, indiscreet, newspaperized American girl,” whose desire for publicity was “one of the most striking signs of our times.”8 Woolson’s withdrawal from public notoriety preserved her status as a proper woman, however. Surely she could trust James to treat her with more respect than he did the “newspaperized American girl.” But she still had cause for worry.

  While his essay on Howells had begun quite conventionally with biographical details about the author, his essay on Woolson began much differently, indicating how foremost it was in his mind that he was writing about a woman. After a paragraph on the prominence of women in current literature, which says nothing about his proposed subject, he then erects a protective screen around her:

  The work of Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson is an excellent example of the way the door stands open between the personal life of American women and the immeasurable world of print. . . . [Her work] breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative—the sort of spirit which . . . seem[s] most to oppose itself to the introduction into the feminine lot of new and complicating elements. . . . [I]t would never occur to her to lend her voice for the plea for further exposure—for a revolution which should place her sex in the thick of the struggle for power. Such is the turn of mind of the author . . . and if it has not prevented her from writing books, from competing for the literary laurel, this is proof of the strength of the current which to-day carries both sexes alike to that mode of expression.

  At the end of the essay, he reiterates that her works “all have the stamp . . . of the author’s conservative feeling, the implication that for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations.”9

  On the one hand, James was trying to preserve her privacy by telling readers she desired no “exposure.” On the other, he thrust her into the fray of “competing [with men] for the literary laurel,” hardly a “conservative” act. James seems to be taking his cues from Woolson herself, seeking a compromise between the private woman he knew and the artist her writings had revealed her to be. It was a conundrum neither could easily solve. His essay suggests he supported her determination to maintain a conservative identity as a woman while she also adopted a fairly radical conception of herself as a serious author. In fact, the only way she could make the assertiveness of her bid for recognition palatable was to hide it behind an image of herself as a private, traditional woman.

  Under pressure to include some biographical details about his subject, James mentions a few, pretending to be simply an interested reader rather than someone who actually knows her. In his essay on Howells, he hadn’t mentioned their relationship either because he wanted to distance himself from his friend’s critical views, namely an adulatory essay on James that had drawn intense criticism.10 James also had to distance himself from Woolson, but for different reasons. Their friendship was known to a few friends and relations but it was not something either wanted publicized. To avoid the scandal that could ensue if their closeness became the topic of public discussion, James kept “Miss Woolson” at arm’s length.

  Applying his own dictum that “[t]he artist’s life is his work, and this is the place to observe him,” most of the essay concerns itself with her writings. Considering that most criticism on women writers focused inordinately on the author’s personal life, his focus on her work suggests his great respect. “Miss Woolson” does, in fact, contain some very high praise. He found her southern stories “the fruit of a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling” and thought East Angels “represent[ed] a long stride in her talent,” predicting that “if her talent is capable, in another novel, of making an advance equal to that represented by this work in relation to its predecessors, she will have made a substantial contribution to our new literature.”11

  Perhaps most important to Woolson, he was loyal to her in his lengthy defense of her portrayal of Margaret Thorne in East Angels. Some small criticisms creep in, and although he could be accused of some “enigmatic doublespeak,” he was much kinder to her than he was to Howells. James came close to the heart of her work (and life) when he noted that she was “fond of irretrievable personal failures, of people who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and suffer in silence, and minister in secret to those who look over their heads. She is interested in secret histories, in the ‘inner life’ of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried.”12

  Woolson must have been pleased with the essay. James had protected her privacy, taken her side against Howells, and given her some of the highest praise he had granted any woman writer.

  UNDER THE SAME ROOF

  In the early spring of 1887, not long after the publication of “Miss Woolson,” James fell seriously ill in Venice. After much worry over his strange symptoms, he discov
ered that he had jaundice. Woolson was alarmed and wrote him letters of consolation and advice. She worried she had intruded herself, but he sent her a message through Boott: “Tell Fenimore I forgive her—but only an angel would. She will understand.” As James’s sister Alice explained to her sister-in-law back in the United States, “I hear from him & from an outside source [Woolson] that the attack is a light one.” But Woolson must have known how serious it was. James would later say that his health “was more acutely deranged in Venice than it had been since my youthful years.” Alice was relieved to learn that he had “Miss Woolson in the background at Bellosguardo upon whom he is going to fall back when he is able to travel to Florence.”13 Woolson had offered him the apartment below hers, where he could recuperate far from the cold air of Venice and avoid the social obligations of Florence.

  James arrived in the middle of April. Dr. Baldwin, Woolson’s friend and doctor, met him at the train station and escorted him to Bellosguardo. James’s health and good spirits revived quickly. He planned to stay until the first of June so that he could fully recover. Unlike his previous stay, this time he was Woolson’s guest. He planned to “lead a life of seclusion and finish some work,” he told one friend whose lunch invitation he declined. James was busy writing “The Aspern Papers,” a story about an eager biographer who insinuates himself into the lives of two unmarried women—an elderly aunt and her middle-aged niece—in Venice. The narrator hopes the aunt will die and leave him her love letters from a famous writer whose memory he has cultivated. James’s return to the Villa Brichieri may have recalled to him the voracious appetite of the public for authors’ lives, an appetite he had attempted to both satisfy and thwart in “Miss Woolson.” The story’s theme of a secret relationship, the evidence of which is burned in the end, may also have been inspired by the deepening friendship between the two writers, which they increasingly desired to keep to themselves.14