Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Woolson’s greatest fear was losing her independence. As her niece Clare would later write, “[S]he was very proud and did not wish to be a burden on anyone.” Her ability to support herself by her writing “was a great source of pride.” Worries about money had stalked her ever since her father’s death, but when they grew severe, as they had at Bellosguardo, her thoughts turned to escape. Some of that despair made its way into Jupiter Lights when Eve contemplates suicide. She asks herself, “[I]s it wrong to try to die?” But recalling her own father’s stoicism, Woolson wrote, “The stern Puritan blood of her father in her answered, ‘One must not give up until one has exhausted every atom of one’s strength in the contest.’ ”42

  More than anything, it was Sam’s material aid that gave her the courage to carry on. “I feel inspired to take hold anew,” she told him. She would leave the villa at the end of the year, live more closely within her means, and start saving again for the future. “The hopelessness has gone, and that is everything. For we cannot really live without hope.”43 Sam’s money would allow her to pay off her debts and move out of the villa, recover from the year’s work by traveling (with Clara’s assistance as well), and then start over someplace new.

  Nonetheless, she lamented leaving Bellosguardo, where she still felt Lizzie’s presence. She also feared losing her last tie to Boott. Her solitary evenings were spent playing the piano and singing his songs “Thou and I” and “Through the Long Days,” which are about longing for absent loved ones. Meanwhile, happy news arrived from the Harpers, who, as Jupiter Lights neared the end of its serial run, informed Constance that it was “considered ‘the strongest thing’ ” she had written. She was hearing the same thing from her literary friends.44

  On September 6, finally free of the book proofs for Jupiter Lights, exhausted and sick of even the sight of a pen, she boarded a train for England. Once there, she rested for a month in Richmond, a bucolic community just outside of London. She slept peacefully and walked six or eight miles a day through the parks surrounding the village and visited Kew Gardens, Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court. She rowed on the Thames, feeling health return to her body and mind with each stroke of the oars. Occasionally, she went to town to visit James, finding him healthy and in good spirits. She was amazed at his productivity. In a letter to Boott, she expressed her concern that he was doing too much, echoing his earlier worries about her. She wished he could take a break from writing as she had.45

  In December, while she was back in Italy to pack up the Villa Brichieri, Jupiter Lights was published in book form. Although Woolson was again cut off from the reviews, the Harpers told her “no novel of recent years has been more favorably received.” One paper proclaimed that the “vigorous and romantic composition” went far “to confirm the judgment, already pretty well made, that Miss Woolson is among the few greatest women who write fiction.” The novel “evinces much power . . . and a vigor of style most remarkable,” declared another magazine. It was “one of the strongest tales ever written by an American.” The New York Herald thought Woolson was “without an equal in portraying the nature and emotions of women.” English audiences were as pleased as ever with her work. The Spectator compared Jupiter Lights favorably to Anne, “one of the best novels that America has produced for the last quarter of a century,” and the Athenaeum thought the novel would not disappoint English readers, who have come to expect “a powerful and romantic story” from Woolson.46

  The critical tone taken toward her work returned, however, in some of the usual quarters. The Atlantic’s Horace Scudder understood the book’s theme—“Woman’s love is absolute abandonment of self”—but disliked what he described as “a network of emotional torture.” He felt the book threatened a “sane, wholesome” view of life. A religious periodical compared Jupiter Lights to French novels and determined that “there is something shameless and offensive in the way in which Miss Woolson conceives and describes her women. . . . Certainly these headstrong creatures, overmastered by passion for men who may be drunkards, licentious, unfaithful, cruel, despotic . . . are not types of sentiment which has ever been recognized as Christian.”47

  Someone made a point of sending Woolson a copy of the New York Evening Post containing a brutal attack upon Jupiter Lights. As the paper was under the same management as The Nation, it appeared there as well. It began, “Miss Woolson must have been dominated by an evil spirit” when she wrote the book. “It is more easy to believe that she was ‘possessed’ than that she deliberately chose to write a long novel about the stupid and obstinate attachment of a silly woman for a man who, every few months, became insanely drunk, beat her, turned her out of doors, and tried to kill both her and her child. . . . All of this is sheer romantic nonsense.” Woolson no longer cared what the critics had to say, but she was bothered by the feeling that this review “may come—in spirit—from Mr Howells, who, strange to say, has turned from a friend to an enemy. He is powerful; & he is on the spot; & he dislikes with a vengeance! When he does dislike. It is the one painful spot in my literary life, because I used to like him so much, & trust him.”48

  The Harpers were satisfied with the positive reviews and the novel’s modest sales of 6,000 copies. They wanted a new novel as soon as Woolson could produce one, but it would be a while before she was ready to start writing again. She was on her way to “the lands of the Arabian Nights and the realms of my childhood’s dreams.”49

  PART FIVE

  The Final Years

  1890–1894

  “I feel like another person—so broadened in mind by an actual look into the strange life of the East.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  “When suffering becomes too great, we are always at liberty to leave life altogether.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  13

  To Cairo and Back

  IN THE third week of December 1889, Constance left Bellosguardo for good and began her journey on the express train down the Adriatic coast of Italy. With the cerulean sea running along outside, the talk inside was of her fellow passengers’ travel plans. Their casual references to Cairo, Ceylon, and Java were like “the shining balls of a juggler” hanging in the air.1 Listening and watching, she began scribbling in a notebook the impressions that would eventually become two articles for Harper’s magazine.

  The Benedicts were waiting for her in southern Italy, where they took a ship bound for the Greek island of Corfu. The next morning, Constance looked out to see blue sky, purple mountains, and the red sails of a fishing boat, all overhung by a golden atmosphere. When they arrived in Greece, the light and colors astounded her—violet fields, a sapphire sea, and “salmon, . . . ochre, saffron, and cinnamon brown” hues.2

  They spent eleven days in Corfu, including Christmas, exchanging presents in their rooms and attending an English church service packed with sailors and soldiers. From Corfu, they rather boldly sailed without male protection on a small steamer through the Ionian Sea. Constance recalled “everything poetical & classical [she] had ever read, from Homer to Childe Harold,” and delighted in the “picturesque effects of the Greek & Albanian peasants on board, & their remarkable costumes & luggage.”3

  Constance’s sister Clara (above) and her niece Clare (below), now twenty-one years old, were Constance’s travel companions to Corfu, Athens, Egypt, and the Holy Land.

  (From Voices Out of the Past, vol. 1 of Five Generations (1785–1923))

  Their adventure turned threatening, however, when they approached Patras late at night and were greeted by a mob of Greek men, some of them armed with pistols, competing to secure their luggage. One even grabbed Constance by the arm and tried to drag her toward another hotel. They were finally rescued by their landlord. Upon their departure from Patras, as they attempted to board a train bound for Athens, they were greeted by a crowd of irate boatmen protesting the new railway. A policeman was thankfully on hand to shield them. It unnerved them to discover that women were not “accorded, without questi
on, a first place,” as they were in the United States and Europe.4

  Athens quickly erased the memories of Patras. The Acropolis and the Parthenon were the most beautiful sights of Constance’s life thus far. But she was eager to push farther. They decided to sail for Alexandria and then travel to Cairo. Constance never expected to be able to make such a trip, but Sam’s money and Clara’s offer to pay for her voyages to and from Cairo made it possible.5

  When they landed at Alexandria, Constance was captivated by her first encounter with Arabs. She explained to her friend and editor Henry Mills Alden, “I knew they were there, before I saw them; but there was no realization of them in my mind. Now, I can picture to myself also the swarms of humanity in India and China. And as I was greatly struck by the intelligence & dignity of the oriental character, I can’t look down upon them as I used to,—from a superior Anglo-Saxon standpoint. That is the trouble of traveling widely over the world, and living for years in foreign countries; one inevitably loses one’s old standards, and comfortable fixed prejudices and opinions.”6

  As soon as they arrived in Cairo, they found rooms at the Continental. (The more popular Shepheard’s Hotel was full following the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley, fresh from his exploration of Africa.) Achmed, a “charming boy in his lovely silk suit,” waited on them and escorted them on their expeditions, beginning with the sites recommended by Daniel Willard Fiske, whose notes were their constant companion.7

  Unfortunately, it poured for two days as soon as they arrived and was colder than they expected. The lack of cheery fires turned their rooms into dank cells. Clara was especially unhappy, fearing she had contracted malaria. Constance was for once undeterred by the cold. She told Sam, “I do’nt know what Clara has been writing to Cleveland on the subject of ‘Cairo.’ But I, at least, am fascinated & charmed.” The trip restored her health and, more importantly, her enthusiasm for life. She felt “twenty years younger,” she wrote to Sam just before her fiftieth birthday. While Clara wanted to cut their trip short, Constance began to contemplate staying on by herself. Her sister was dumbfounded, saying that if she were left there alone, she would “become a howling dervish in a day.”8

  Before her sister and niece’s departure, the three took excursions to the Sphinx and the Pyramids, where they had their picture taken, Constance appearing fat and happy on her donkey. She refused to ride a camel, and even donkeys were a source of terror for her. They also took a short trip up the Nile to the temple ruins and their tombs. The silver and reddish-gold colors of the desert and the caravan of camels reminded her of images from the Bible. They discovered on these trips relics more ancient than any they seen had seen in Greece, including a mummy over 5,700 years old.9

  After the Nile, they joined some American friends for a hurried, ten-day tour through the Holy Land. They sailed from Port Said to Jaffa, then traveled to Jerusalem, a nearly full moon illuminating the treeless landscape. Constance was captivated by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the supposed site of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial, as large and ornate as Saint Mark’s in Venice. A very large group of Russian peasant pilgrims, who had walked most of the way from their homeland, impressed the three women from Cleveland with their intense devotion, kneeling down to kiss the stones, tears running down their faces. In contrast, Constance and the two Claras rushed through the attractions, rising at four or five in the morning so as to make it to Jericho, Jordan, and Bethlehem before mother and daughter sailed back to Europe. In order to make the trip, poor Connie had to endure three days on horseback. “Do’nt ask me how I arrived,” she wrote to Sam, “but think of [explorer] Lady Hester Stanhope.” At the end of their journey, they felt as if “part of our being has remained still in the 19th century, while another part of it, has seemed, in some unaccountable way, walking about in the bible days.”10

  Constance, Clare, and Clara (left to right) on their trip to the Pyramids.

  (The Western Reserve Historical Society)

  ALONE IN CAIRO

  With the Benedicts gone, Constance returned to Cairo and quickly found herself at the center of the large expatriate community there. Europeans had long had a strong presence in the region due to the strategic location of the Suez Canal. Since 1882, the British had occupied Egypt in the face of opposition by nationalist forces. During Constance’s stay in 1890, the British were attempting to modernize Egypt’s economy and political system, but anticolonial resistance remained strong.

  Unlike earlier in Florence, Woolson was the feted literary lion, with no one else’s shadow to hide in. The American consul Eugene Schuyler visited her daily, bearing flowers or books as tokens of his fondness. She had met him and his wife in Florence as friends of Professor Fiske. A career diplomat, he was also the author of a series of essays on Russian history and literature for Scribner’s Magazine as well as the first English translator of Turgenev and Tolstoy. He hated Egypt, he told Woolson, but he loved spending time with her and talking about writing. Her literary views were a revelation to him. “She has quite set me up,” he wrote to a correspondent. “She cares not about plot, but only for the way things are done, and she puts my little stories way, way up, next to the French, for facture [workmanship]. Now she wants me to write a play, and has left me a lot of French ones to read and profit by.” Woolson later wrote to Hay, “His whole interest was in his new idea of writing fiction, & upon that he would talk for hours.” After he died of malaria, three months later, she realized that she was one of the last Americans who had spent much time with him.11

  Another daily companion in Cairo was James Peirce, a Harvard professor of mathematics. Although their relationship, which would continue beyond Cairo, seems to have been based primarily on their shared fascination with “the Orient,” Peirce also shared many associates with Henry James, including Peirce’s brother, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and two close friends: Thomas Sergeant Perry, who had visited Constance in Florence, and Edmund Gosse.

  The German archeologist Emile Brugsch Bey was a frequent companion as well. He thrilled her with the story of his famous discovery of the pharaohs’ mummies at Deir el-Bahri: how he descended the shaft into a chamber that had been hidden for three centuries and there saw names on the coffins—among them Ramses the Great—that so astounded him he had to be pulled back up to keep from fainting. He also shared with her his agitation over the success of the English Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards’s lecture tour in the United States. Constance sensed his incredulity “that women could be very profound scholars in anything,” and although she didn’t agree, she feared it would “take several generations of study and training before our . . . women can equal our men.”12

  The popular Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant also made an impression on Constance, although they were not close. She wrote to Sam, “I listened to her, (& secretly studied her) very intently; I was curious to find out the secret of the amount of work she produces; she has written about forty novels, & still turns them out at the rate of two or three each year!” In actuality, Oliphant had already written at least eighty novels. For a slow, deliberate writer like Woolson, such an output was inconceivable. Oliphant’s secret, she discovered, was a team of people—maid, niece, and son—who relieved her of every conceivable task outside of her writing, even putting on her bonnet and shoes. Oliphant also gathered her impressions quickly, breezing through the Holy Land in a mere two weeks in preparation to write a book about the region. By contrast, Constance stayed in Cairo for two and a half months and felt only barely qualified to “risk some slight ‘impressions.’ ” She was certainly “not a Mrs Oliphant!” she told Sam.13

  The notes Constance gathered during her stay in Cairo would have made a long book, but the Harpers wanted her to write another novel. In the two-part essay she wrote instead, “Cairo in 1890,” she appears curious and remarkably nonjudgmental about the strikingly different modes of life she encountered. Constance ventured far beyond the expatriate and colonial community in her research. For
instance, she made it her special mission, as she rode through the narrow streets of Cairo on a donkey, to follow the minarets and hunt down mosques unmentioned by the guidebooks. One day she stumbled upon a small mosque that had never been visited by Western tourists and had no slippers to cover her “unsanctified shoes.” Her request to enter was met with a fierce glare, but when she made an offering to the blind, who were considered sacred, the mats were rolled up, “the three or four Muslims present withdrew to the door, and the unbeliever was allowed to enter.” Once inside, she reveled in the stunning marble, mosaics, and gilded inscriptions.14 On her way out, she noticed that a line of blind men had gathered by the door.

  The religious piety of Muslims made a great impression on Constance. She noted on the face of one praying man “a more concentrated expression of devotion” than she had ever seen. From the window of her hotel, she observed a plasterer who stopped his work to wash, kneel toward Mecca, and pray. In a letter to Alden she described the impact of Egypt on her religious views. In response to his declaration that Christianity was not the only sanctified religion, she enthused, “When one has been in Egypt—the jumping-off place of history—one comes to believe in ages and ages of human existence; one loses one’s way, & all one’s old standards and measuring lines. One cannot come back to one’s beliefs, & it is exasperating to be asked to come back.”15

  Constance regretted that she rarely had the opportunity to engage Egyptians personally. One day, as she visited the Gizeh Museum, home to the treasures of Deir el-Bahri, she was intrigued by a group of women watched over by eunuchs; they turned out to be the harem of the minister for foreign affairs. She observed them closely, meticulously noting every detail of their appearance, including plump feet stuffed into preposterously high-heeled French slippers. For some time she stood next to one of them, a girl of about fourteen, as they examined together the jewelry of Queen Ahhotpu. She felt a connection to the girl and “our sister in vanity of three thousand five hundred years ago.” As their faces came close together, the girl’s eyes rose to meet hers, and Constance longed to be able talk to her in her own language.16