Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Remembrance

  WOOLSON’S STORIES and novels were a tremendous critical and popular success in the late nineteenth century. Yet they were summarily dismissed as Victorian in the early twentieth century and then as not sufficiently feminist in the late twentieth. The fate of Woolson’s lasting reputation also was not helped by the fact that she died at the age of fifty-three, just as a new era was dawning. Unlike James, she did not have the chance to reinvent herself as a modernist. Nor did she have the opportunity to win the national awards that would be instituted after the turn of the century, such as the Pulitzer Prize, won by her successors Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. She belonged to an earlier generation that was soon forgotten, buried under the epithets of “sentimental” or “local color.” Even Wharton and Cather, whose successes owe much to Woolson’s pioneering career, appear to have been oblivious to her. As early as 1906, only twelve years after her death, a reader wrote to the New York Times, “Miss Woolson has done too much for America and Americans to be forgotten and ignored.”1 Yet she was.

  One person who could have ensured she was not did little to promote her memory—James. He continued to draw inspiration from her life and death for his fiction, as in The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902. Yet he never paid tribute to Woolson’s literary achievements, as he had done when she was alive with the essay in Partial Portraits. Had he posthumously acknowledged her contributions to literature, her star might not have faded as quickly as it did.

  The obituaries and assessments of Woolson’s career immediately following her death gave no indication that she was a writer who would soon be forgotten. She was ranked at or near the head of American fiction writers and was often considered the best of America’s living women writers because she had proven herself in the genres of the short story and the novel. Frequently referred to as a hard worker and true artist, she was deemed to have gained not only the momentary praise of the masses but also the more selective opinion of the critics. Many predicted that her works would receive a permanent place in the roll of America’s great writers. In an interview that ran in the New York Tribune, Edmund Clarence Stedman compared her to Jane Austen and the Brontës, calling her “one of the leading women in the American literature of the century.”2

  Tributes to Woolson’s art in Great Britain were also numerous. The Glasgow Herald lamented, “Miss Woolson’s death is a distinct loss to American literature, and indeed to the list of novelists who have compelled the attention of the English-speaking race all over the world.” The Illustrated London News classed her with Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman but lamented that her “reputation was so recent,” at least in England.3

  Americans had no such excuse—they had known her for at least twenty years as “one of the first in America to bring the short story to its present excellence,” in the words of Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and collaborator with Mark Twain. Warner paid one of the greatest tributes to Woolson, declaring that her death was “deplored by the entire literary fraternity of this country.” Perfectly capturing the essence of her achievement, he wrote, “She was a sympathetic [and] refined observer, entering sufficiently into the analytic mode of the time, but she had the courage to deal with the passions, and life as it is.”4

  When Horace Chase was published in book form, shortly after Woolson’s death, reviewers considered the novel in light of her career. It proved, wrote the Atlantic, that “there was still power in the writer for a long continuance of good work; that it was done by a person who had mastered much of the technique of her art.” Most agreed that it showed no falling off of conscientiousness in her work. The Cleveland Plain Dealer believed, “In no one of her previous novels has there been greater evidence of deep thought and careful workmanship.” Some viewed Horace Chase as “the strongest character she has ever depicted.” Overall, the reviews were positive as concerns the novel’s craftsmanship but divided once again on questions of its morality and portrayal of female characters, whom some found inappropriate models for contemporary womanhood.5

  Yet news of her supposed suicide and references in the early notices of her death to her “eccentricity,” a code word for insanity, complicated posthumous reactions to Woolson and her work. Her family’s counterattack seems to have had some effect, and the Harpers came out in force to defend the reputation of one of their foremost writers. Nonetheless, the rumors of suicide and insanity settled themselves into the collective psyche. There is not a sympathetic word to be found in any of the newspaper and magazine obituaries for the idea that she had taken her own life. An aura of tragic sensitivity had not yet formed around the image of the suicidal artist. In the late nineteenth century, before the world wars, suicide was viewed as a symptom of a diseased mind rather than a consequence of a flawed world. More recently, the suicide, particularly the female suicide, has been viewed as the victim of an oppressive society. As Woolson was recuperated by feminist scholars, her life and death were often aligned with what some have called the head-in-the-oven school of women writers. However, I agree with Phyllis Rose that there should be “less emphasis on despair, more on resilience in the literary history of women.”6 If we allow the purported fact of Woolson’s suicide to overshadow her life and work, we fail to appreciate the complexity of her experience and the significance of her literary accomplishments.

  Perhaps more damaging to Woolson’s literary reputation was the fact that conditions generally were not favorable for a woman writer who wrote passionately about the hunger for love and the restraints of the Victorian era. Woolson died in a time of shifting literary tastes. Naturalism, with its emphasis on the gritty side of existence, was just then coming into vogue. But it was the growing disdain for sincerity and emotion in life generally that hurt her reputation most. During her lifetime, Woolson had noticed a growing suspicion of earnestness. After her death, her sister Clara summed up the post–World War I era: “It’s the fashion (terribly increased by the war) to scorn emotions of love or ‘feelings’—all must be joking and slang. . . . I occasionally overhear—I sometimes read in letters—things between lovers and husbands and wives that make me feel perfectly thankful to have lived in an earlier period, when each word or line of love was treasured, and each look precious forever.” In 1929, the critic John Hervey held up Woolson’s For the Major as “one of the little masterpieces of American fiction” because of “its perfect sincerity and exquisite sympathy.” He was one of the few who lamented the satiric turn in literature and yearned for characters portrayed without “a jeer, a sneer, or a jibe.”7 Woolson sided with sincerity and passion, and it cost her the appreciation of most later critics and readers.

  We think of the Victorian era as a time of repressed feelings, but the post-Victorian world showed a much greater contempt for expressions of emotion, labeling them sentimental and associating them with an inferior sphere of popular women writers. The split between high/male and low/female literary spheres was already taking shape when Woolson began her career. She had tried to avoid being classified with other women writers because of this perception and had to a large extent succeeded in distinguishing herself as a writer and not simply a woman writer. But as the desire to consolidate a select, all-male canon of American literature took hold, she and every other nineteenth-century female writer of merit was pushed to the sidelines and virtually erased from the literary map.8

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, influential literary critics who were invested in a broader literary history, such as Fred Lewis Pattee, John Dwight Kern, and Lyon Richardson, championed Woolson.9 Yet the gender divide persisted, with Howells and James crowned as American realists and Jewett and Freeman as the leaders of the so-called minor school of women’s regionalism. Woolson’s work fell into the chasm between, defying easy classification. She had been hailed alongside James and Howells, but there was no room for a female voice in the male literary movement of realism. And she had helped to pioneer an American literary regionalism that examined the lives of men as
much as the lives of women, so her work did not fit the all-female construction of that movement.

  As feminist critics reclaimed women writers in the late twentieth century, Woolson again did not fit the mold. Her relationships with male writers, her stories written from a male perspective, and her gender- and genre-blurring writing generally made her less attractive to the majority of feminist critics, who more easily reclaimed Jewett, Freeman, and Kate Chopin. There was still no camp to put her in and apparently no room for a writer who defied the existing categories, although that is beginning to change as critics become less invested in gender divides.

  The one context in which Woolson’s work and life have been most frequently understood is that of her friendship with Henry James, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Without her association with one of the foremost writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she might have been completely forgotten; however, the Master has cast over her a long shadow. It was James’s biographer, Leon Edel, who reintroduced her to a general readership in the 1960s. However, despite having written to her niece Clare about his great respect for her and his desire to write a biography of Woolson after he was finished with James, he portrayed her in print as “prosy and banal, a journey-woman of letters,” claiming that James’s choice to bestow “upon work as regional and ‘magazineish’ as hers the discriminating literary taste which he had hitherto reserved for the leading European writers of fiction, or upon figures such as Hawthorne or even Howells, strikes one today as curious.” In spite of James’s respect for her, Edel diminished Woolson’s work as “minute—and cluttered,” calling her an “ardent devotee of ‘local color.’ ”10 Edel’s disparagement provoked the defense of a small but potent group of feminist scholars, many of whom discovered Woolson through their study of James. In the 1980s and ’90s they published groundbreaking studies of her work and were successful in having some of her work republished, including getting “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” into college anthologies. Joan Weimer’s collection, Women Artists, Women Exiles: “Miss Grief” and Other Stories, in the influential American Women Writers series published by Rutgers University Press, put Woolson back on the literary map, but confusion over where exactly she belonged again relegated her to the margins, and it has long since gone out of print.11

  Regardless of the seemingly eternal critical debates about which writing is most respected or how to categorize writers, Woolson wanted simply to be remembered. That is why she refused to be buried in Venice’s Protestant Cemetery—on a remote and rarely visited island in the lagoon—and insisted instead on burial in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome among what is estimated to be the densest collection of famous people in a single cemetery. After her funeral, John Hay wrote to Sam Mather, “I am glad to think this fine genius and noble woman is to rest in such surroundings till the day of judgment. She is worthy company for the best and brightest that sleep around her, though Shelley and Keats are among them. Her grave will be a shrine for the intelligence of the world for many a year to come.”12 And for many years it was. Listed in Baedeker’s, it was the site of many a devotion by visitors who left flowers on her grave, along with those of other famous British and Americans.

  Today, one climbs up a sloping hill to reach a simple tomb of marble coping inscribed “Constance Fenimore Woolson 1894.” A plain Celtic cross lies atop a bed of violets. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s grave is nearby, as is the grave of the sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife.

  Woolson’s grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery (as it is called today) in Rome. Pansies, a flower of remembrance, bestowed by the author on All Souls Day, 2012.

  (Photograph by the author)

  Clara summed up the beauty and serenity of the place: “This cemetery is the only joyous cemetery I know of—there, the flowers always bloom, the birds always sing. . . . When I think of our cold snowy cemeteries at home, I wish that all I loved rested just there—where Connie sleeps.”13 When Clara died in Venice in 1923, she was buried in the Rome cemetery as well, as was her daughter, Clare, in 1961.

  The spot retains its peacefulness, a walled oasis on the outskirts of Rome that attracts scores of visitors each day seeking out its tranquil beauty and making pilgrimages to the graves of Shelley, Keats, and the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci’s grave lies covered with offerings—books, flowers, stones, and notes—Woolson’s is no longer disturbed by tributes of remembrance. Yet her presence is palpable under the soaring cypress trees and in the shadow of the ancient Pyramid of Cestius, a place where the living still come by the thousands each year to remember the dead.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK would not have been possible without the groundwork laid by the scholars of the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society, especially Sharon Dean’s years-long effort that resulted in The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson. I am enormously grateful for her willingness to share the manuscript before publication and for her support throughout the research and writing of this book. The work of Joan Weimer, Cheryl Torsney, Victoria Brehm, and Lyndall Gordon was also essential to providing me a gateway into Woolson’s life and work.

  Funding for this project came from the Office of Research at the University of New Orleans, which provided a Creative Endeavor Opportunity Grant in summer 2011; the National Endowment for the Humanities, which granted me a fellowship for the calendar year 2012; the English Department at the University of New Orleans, which supplemented the NEH fellowship; and the Louisiana Board of Regents, which provided an ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) Grant for a teaching reduction in spring 2013 and travel funds to conduct research in Europe.

  My immense thanks to the Department of English at the University of New Orleans, particularly the chair of English, Peter Schock, for providing funding for research assistants and for supporting my work in the few ways left to an underfunded department in a university suffering repeated, draconian budget cuts. The following students provided invaluable assistance in the research and production of this book: Megan Cian, Chance Sweat, Coleen Muir, Kimberly Clouse, and Erin Henley. The amazing students in two graduate seminars—“Henry James and the Women Who Influenced Him” and “Writing Lives”—pushed me to think further about the Woolson-James relationship and writing the lives of women of the past.

  I am grateful to Sharon Dean, John Pearson, Sharon M. Harris, and Robert D. Richardson for writing letters of recommendation for grant applications; to Cheryl Torsney, Keith O’Brien, Stephanie Stanley, Kate Stewart, Catherine Michna, Molly Mitchell, Patricia Henley, and Miki Pfeffer for feedback on the book proposal and/or chapters of the manuscript; and to Beverly Rude for invaluable editorial assistance throughout. Michael Gorra, Pierre Walker, and Sharon Dean graciously read and commented on the entire manuscript. Any errors that remain are my own.

  In collecting the primary research materials for this book, I have incurred many debts. The greatest one I owe to Micha Grudin, who transcribed for me the twenty-two letters Woolson wrote to Francis Boott, now in possession of the descendants of Francis Boott Duveneck. My thanks as well to Carol Osborne for putting me in touch with Micha. I am grateful to the Interlibrary Loan staff at the University of New Orleans, particularly Janet Crane; Hilary Dorsch Wong at the Kroch Library at Cornell University; Dr. Richard Virr, Head and Curator of Manuscripts at McLennan Library, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University; Darla Moore and Wenxian Zhang at the Archives of Olin Library at Rollins College, Florida; Ann Sindelar and the staff of the Western Reserve Historical Society; Greg Zacharias and Rosalind Parr at the Center for Henry James Studies; Mark Boarman at the Thompson Library at Ohio State University; Jonathan Matthews, Assistant Site Director of Old Cahawba; Marylou Bradley and RuthAnne Jackson at the Kaua’i Historical Society; and John McClintock, archivist at The Albany Academies.

  I am also grateful to the following individuals for helping me to locate important sources. Connie Anderson, great-great-niece of Constance Fenimore Wool
son, scanned pages of the Mather family scrapbook. Lyndall Gordon helped me locate letters by Woolson. Gary Woolson generously donated many books related to Woolson, after Hurricane Katrina claimed my home library, and shared his genealogical research as well as the death record of Charles Woolson Jr. Edoarda Grego shared with me her translations of Venetian newspaper accounts of Woolson’s death. Sharon Harris generously aided me in searching periodical databases to which I did not have access at my institution. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi provided valuable information on the Casa Semitecolo in Venice. Pierre Walker shared proofs of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880, volume 2, before their publication in 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press. Wayne Franklin and Rochelle Johnson shared letters relating to the Woolson family that they found in the course of their research on James Fenimore Cooper and Susan Fenimore Cooper, respectively. Janet Crane and Jeanne Pavy helped me to scan illustrations. Stella Gray and her granddaughter Ivy Gray-Klein photographed letters written by Clare Benedict.

  I am also grateful to the many who helped make my trip to Europe to follow in Woolson’s footsteps a success. In Florence, Caroline Burton Michahelles, invited me for lunch at the Villa Brichieri-Colombi and delighted me with her hospitality. I am grateful to Stephanie McCoy, who is writing a novel about Woolson, for putting me in touch with Ms. Michahelles and providing travel advice generally. In Venice, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi gave me a tour of the Grand Canal and showed me landmarks important to Woolson; she also showed me some fragments of Woolson letters at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. In Rome, Amanda Thursfield, director of the Non-Catholic Cemetery, was a wonderful guide and dinner companion. In Oxford, Dr. Robert Tobin, the chaplain of Oriel College, helped me identify Woolson’s home outside the gates of the college and discussed the High Church movement in the Anglican Church over tea; Dr. Peter Groves, parish priest of St. Mary Magdalen, gave me a thorough tour of Woolson’s home in Beaumont Street, where he now lives; and Lyndall Gordon invited me to lunch at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, where we had a wonderful talk about all things Woolson.