Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  26. “Major Zeph Swift Spalding,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 11, 1862. “A Terrible Scene,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Nov. 4, 1862, p. 3. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” 235, 234. Report of Lieut. Col. Zephaniah S. Spalding, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 1, 572–75, Ancestry.com.

  27. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” 235. Jessee Hawes, Cahaba: A Story of Captive Boys in Blue (New York: Burr, 1888), 14–16. Rufus Spalding, who became a U.S. congressman, later reported on his son’s experience to the House of Representatives: “Mr. Spalding and the Million Dollar Resolution,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Mar. 25, 1867.

  28. CFW to Hamilton Mabie, June 18, [1883], CL, 258. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48. J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 226.

  29. Sandol Stoddard, “Biography of Col. Spalding,” Earl Arruda Papers, Kauai Historical Society. “Leasing of Abandoned Plantations,” Nashville Daily Union, Mar. 9, 1864, p. 1. Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many?: Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War–Era Tennessee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 535.

  30. I was unable to verify Zeph’s whereabouts from the end of the war until 1867, but his wartime leasing of plantations and his later post as a cotton planter in Hawaii strongly suggest he had gone south. Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 145–46. Cheryl Torsney, “Zephaniah Swift Spalding: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Cipher,” in Kathleen Diffley, ed., Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 114–15.

  31. CFW signed herself “Miss Constance Woolson, spinster” on a letter published in the Cleveland Herald on Feb. 2, 1869.

  32. CWB, fragment of letter, no recipient, n.d., Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Benedict III, 615, 621.

  33. CFW, “Cicely’s Christmas,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Dec. 30, 1871): 758. CFW, “Wilhelmina,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (Jan. 1875): 44–55. Torsney, “Zephaniah Swift Spalding,” 124.

  34. CFW, “Hepzibah’s Story,” in Robert Gingras, “ ‘Hepzibah’s Story’: An Unpublished Work by Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Resources for American Literary Study 10 (Spring 1980): 33–46. The manuscript of this story, previously in the archives at Rollins College, has been lost. Gingras explains that the address 131 St. Clair Street was written on the manuscript, indicating that it was written between 1871 and 1873, when Constance lived there.

  35. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535.

  36. CFW, “Heliotrope,” Harper’s 47 (July 1873): 274. CFW, “The Lady of Little Fishing,” Atlantic Monthly 34 (Sept. 1874): 303. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441.

  37. CFW to Flora Payne, [1863/64], CL, 2. “Mrs. William C. Whitney,” Harper’s Weekly 37 (Feb. 18, 1893): 148. Flora Payne’s letters to William C. Whitney, typed excerpts, in William C. Whitney Papers, Library of Congress.

  38. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 3.

  39. Ibid. The only surviving record of the marriage is in their son Philip Carter Washburn’s application to the Sons of the American Revolution, Ancestry.com. CFW to Jane Carter, Jan. 13, [1888], CL, 352.

  40. “Criminal,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Mar. 31, 1869. “Suicide,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Mar. 31, 1869, p. 3.

  41. Benedict I, 110. CFW to unknown recipient, Aug. 24, 1871, CL, 6–7.

  42. “Death of Chas. J. Woolson,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Aug. 6, 1869. Mrs. W. A. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work (Cleveland: W. A. Ingham, 1893), 272.

  43. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1890], CL, 425.

  44. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304. CFW, For the Major (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), 73.

  CHAPTER 4: False Starts

  1. CFW’s first three publications were on these topics. CFW, “An October Idyl,” Harper’s 41 (1870): 907.

  2. J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer (Feb. 4, 1894), p. 8. G.P.K. [George Pomeroy Keese], “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, NY), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3.

  3. “Co-Partnership Notice,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Aug. 12, 1870. “Real Estate Transfers,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Aug. 29, 1870. “A Successful Author’s Advice,” The Ladies’ Home Journal 13 (Aug. 1896): 12. CFW to Elizabeth Mather, Dec. 4, [1874], CL, 23.

  4. William F. G. Shanks, “Woman’s Work and Wages,” Harper’s 37 (Sept. 1868): 548. According to Marian J. Morton, Women in Cleveland: An Illustrated History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 58, female teachers earned $659/year in 1875.

  5. Shanks, “Woman’s Work and Wages,” 548. “Editor’s Easy Chair” (July 1867); S. E. Wallace, “Another Weak-Minded Woman” (Nov. 1867); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “What Shall They Do?” (Sept. 1867), all reprinted in Anne E. Boyd, Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 228–42.

  6. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: The Making of a Modern Publisher (1967; New York: Harper, 2010), 78. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8.

  9. CFW, “An October Idyl,” Harper’s 41 (1870), 907, 911. Idyl is misspelled. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 4.

  10. CFW, “The Haunted Lake,” Harper’s 44 (Dec. 1871): 21, 23, 26.

  11. CFW to Edward Everett Hale, Dec. 1, 1871, CL, 8.

  12. See letters from Samuel L. Mather to SM, July 12, 1870, and July 23, 1870, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.

  13. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 88. Gary Scharnhorst, “James and Kate Field,” Henry James Review 22, no. 2 (2001): 200–206.

  14. CFW, “New York,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Jan. 10, 1871. CFW, “Gotham,” Supplement to the Daily Cleveland Herald, Jan. 14, 1871.

  15. CFW’s letters from Nov. 1870 through early Feb. 1871 are headed with the address No. 49 W. 32nd St. See CL, 5. Mark D. Hirsch, William C. Whitney: Modern Warwick (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948), 47. CFW, “Gotham.”

  16. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 549.

  17. CFW, “Gotham.” CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 549. CFW, “New York.”

  18. CFW, “Gotham.”

  19. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 114. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 57.

  20. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” Harper’s 44 (Jan. 1872): 231–36. CFW, “Cicely’s Christmas,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Dec. 30, 1871): 758.

  21. CFW to ACW, [1870/71], CL, 4.

  22. “The New Hamburg Disaster,” Harper’s Weekly (Feb. 25, 1871). CFW to WWB, Oct. 5, [1890], CL, 422.

  23. “Thy Will Be Done”: George S. Benedict, privately printed, Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS, 81, 19–21.

  24. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, n.d., CL, 560. CFW, “Hepzibah’s Story,” in Robert Gingras, “ ‘Hepzibah’s Story’: An Unpublished Work by Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Resources for American Literary Study 10 (Spring 1980): 45. CFW, “The Flower of the Snow,” The Galaxy 27 (January 1874): 81, 83.

  25. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, n.d., CL, 560. J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. “A Day of Mystery,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Sept. 9, 1871): 290–93. Benedict III, 622. W. S. Robison and Co.’s Cleveland Directory, 1871–1872 (Cleveland: W. S. Robison, 1871), 479.

  26. Estimate of CFW’s earnings based on typical rates of pay provided by Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 13–14. Mott posits “$2,000 as a minimum income for moderate comfort” in the period from 1865 to 1885. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. A note inside a copy of Agnes Phelps [CWB], One Year at Our Boarding-School (Boston: Loring, 1873) in the Clare Benedict Collection at the WRHS explains the circumstances of its production, including the fact that it w
as published “without remuneration.”

  27. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464.

  28. CFW to SM, Apr. 11, [1891], CL, 448. Susan Coolidge [Sarah Woolsey], What Katy Did (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 35–36. CFW to Mary Mapes Dodge, Sept. 13, [1888?], CL, 359.

  29. Hannah called it “a stirring account of ‘the boys’ pranks,” referring to Sam Mather, Charlie Woolson, and the Carter boys. HW to SM, May 15, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.

  30. “Book Notices,” The Youth’s Companion 46 (Mar. 27, 1873): 103. New York Mail quoted in “There Are Two Kinds of Juvenile Books,” The Cleveland Morning Daily Herald, July 9, 1873.

  31. CFW quoted in Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. According to “Our Youth,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, June 14, 1873, CFW also wrote a serial called “Along the Slowgo” for a Cleveland children’s magazine, Our Youth, which I have not been able to locate.

  32. “One Year at Our Boarding-School,” North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia), Dec. 25, 1873, p. 1. Phelps [CWB], One Year at Our Boarding-School.

  33. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464. On the lack of American women writers’ recognition as serious artists before Woolson’s generation, see Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

  CHAPTER 5: Departures

  1. CFW to unknown recipient, Aug. 24, 1871, CL, 6–7. CFW to R. R. Bowker, May 31, 1873, CL, 10.

  2. Reviews quoted in “We fancy the story of ‘Solomon,’ . . . ” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Sept. 23, 1873. CFW to WDH, Oct. 27, [1873?], CL, 11. CFW to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, June 30, [1882], CL, 203. “The Absence of Women at the Whittier Dinner,” New York Evening Post, reprinted in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 28, 1877, p. 2.

  3. CFW to ACW, [1874?], CL, 26. CFW to Miss Farnian, Apr. 17, 1875, CL, 33.

  4. CFW to WDH, Oct. 27, [1873?], CL, 11.

  5. CFW, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s 45 (Sept. 1872): 522. “Literary,” Appletons’ Journal 13 (Apr. 3, 1875): 438.

  6. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. “Ballast Island” prefigures themes in Margaret Wilkins Freeman’s “New England Nun” (1891) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

  7. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161.

  8. WDH, Their Wedding Journey, Atlantic Monthly 28 (Sept. 1871): 354–55. Review of Their Wedding Journey, North American Review 114 (Apr. 1872): 444. Benedict II, 97.

  9. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859; Toronto: Broadview, 2005), 241–42, 239.

  10. CFW to Roberts Brothers, Nov. 12, [1870], CL, 4. George Sand, The Devil’s Pool, trans. Andrew Brown (1846; London: Hesperus Classics, 2005), 6, 7, 8. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins; quote from Paul Bourget. Clara Benedict, fragment inside a copy of For the Major, Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.

  11. CFW, “Solomon,” in Castle Nowhere (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875), 238, 265.

  12. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 87.

  13. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 44.

  14. CFW to SM, Apr. 25, [1875], CL, 34. CFW to ECS, Apr. 13, [1874], CL, 11–12. CFW to ECS, Sept. 7, [1874], CL, 16.

  15. “The Magazines for September,” The Nation 19 (Sept. 3, 1874): 157. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (June 1875): 737.

  16. Samuel Clemens to Olivia Langdon Clemens, Apr. 26, 1873, Hartford, CT. Online at TheMarkTwainProject.org (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00909). Bryant Morey French concluded Warner probably borrowed from CFW’s “Weighed in the Balance” (June 1872). See Mark Twain and the Gilded Age: The Book That Named an Era (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965), 295.

  17. CFW to James R. Osgood, Oct. 22, [1874], CL, 19. CFW, “St. Clair Flats,” in Castle Nowhere, 306, 332, 348. WDH, “Recent Literature,” 737.

  18. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. Sharon Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 17. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 30.

  19. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (June 1875): 736, 737. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43.

  20. CFW to ACW, [1875], CL, 87.

  21. “Literary,” Appletons’ Journal, 439. “Fiction in a New Field,” New York Tribune, Mar. 6, 1875, p. 8.

  22. Samuel L. Mather to SM, Dec. 21, 1872, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.

  23. HW to Mrs. Samuel L. Mather, Nov. 19, 1873, Rollins. SM to Samuel L. Mather, Oct. 22, 1873, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW, “A Letter from Miss Woolson,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Dec. 18, 1873.

  24. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 213.

  25. CFW, “A Letter from Miss Woolson.” HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.

  26. Today Hospital Street is called Aviles Street, and the Fatio House is the Ximenez-Fatio House Museum. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 6. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.

  27. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 25.

  28. CFW, “Ferns,” unpublished poem in Cheryl B. Torsney, “Fern Leaves from Connie’s Portfolio,” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 185. CFW, “The French Broad,” Harper’s 50 (Apr. 1875): 623. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74.

  29. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 366. CFW, “Pine-Barrens,” Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 66.

  30. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, 18, 22.

  31. Ibid., 18.

  32. Ibid., 7. CFW, “Felipa,” Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1971), 209.

  33. The term “Boston marriages,” referring to relationships between women who lived together as a married couple, was widely used after the publication of HJ’s The Bostonians in 1886. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 42 (Oct. 1878): 503. Some have seen in such literary portrayals in “Felipa,” Anne, and Horace Chase the suggestion that CFW herself had homosexual desires. See Kristen Comment, “The Lesbian ‘Impossibilities’ of Miss Grief’s ‘Armor,’ ” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, 207–8. This is possible, although I have found no concrete evidence to support the idea.

  34. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, 14; pt. 2, Harper’s 50 (Jan. 1875): 172. CFW, “King David,” in Rodman the Keeper, 274.

  35. Quoted in Robert J. Scholnick, Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1977), 5.

  36. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, vol. 1 (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1901), 504. “Constance Fenimore Woolson. Her Work and Personality,” New York Tribune (Jan. 28, 1894), p. 14.

  37. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 84. Sharon Dean dates this letter as 1876, but internal evidence indicates it was written in 1875.

  38. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 2, 179, 180. CFW to ECS, Apr. 13, [1874], CL, 11. CFW to ECS, Sept. 7, [1874], CL, 16. ECS to CFW, Sept. 2, 1889, CL, 569.

  39. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 17. CFW to ECS, Sept. 30, [1877], CL, 101.

  40. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 28.

  41. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 83.

  42. Page 114 of CFW’s copy of Victorian Poets, in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.

  43. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 72.

  44. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to R. R. Bowker, Jan. 19, [1875], CL, 27.

  45. CFW to PHH, May Day, 1875, CL, 36. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 73. Excerpts of reviews on the back page of Two Women: 1862. A Poem, by CFW (New York: D. Appleton, 1877). Review of Two Women: 1862, The Independent 29 (June 21, 1877), 9.

  46. Page 121 of CFW’s copy of Victorian Poets, in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.

  47. See Jay Hubbell, “Some New Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The New England Quarte
rly 14 (Dec. 1941): 715–35; quotes from Hayne on 716–17.

  48. CFW to PHH, Feb. 13, [1876], CL, 64. CFW to PHH, [Apr. 17, 1876], CL, 66–67.

  49. CFW to PHH, Aug. 26, [1875], CL, 50. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 17.

  50. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 73.

  51. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 30. Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashions, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 76–78. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1875], CL, 75. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 86.

  52. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 86.

  CHAPTER 6: Dark Places

  1. CFW to ECS, [Sept. 6, 1874], CL, 16. CFW, “In the South,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 7, 1874. CFW, “The French Broad,” Harper’s 50 (Apr. 1875): 618–19. HW to unidentified recipient, May 28, [1874], Benedict I, 250.

  2. CFW to Elizabeth Gwinn Mather, Dec. 4, [1874], CL, 21. CFW, Horace Chase (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 17.

  3. CFW to SM, Apr. 25, [1875], CL, 34. CFW, “Up the Ashley and Cooper,” Harper’s 52 (Dec. 1875): 1–24.

  4. CFW to PHH, Aug. 26, [1875], CL, 49–50. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 51. CWB to KM, 1921, Benedict III, 223. CFW wrote a long poem she never published that was inspired by the trip: “Gettysburg, 1876,” Benedict III, 224–25.

  5. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 51–52. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48.

  6. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 52. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 53.

  7. CFW to ECS, Dec. 2, [1875], CL, 82. Dean dates this letter 1876, but internal evidence suggests 1875. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 62.

  8. CFW to ACW, undated fragment, CL, 561. It is possible that CFW suffered from manic depression. Her intense work habits and frequent travels may be evidence of manic episodes. Clinical symptoms of depression outlined by the American Psychiatric Association in Michael B. First et al., DSM-IV-TR Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., Text Revision (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004), 187. Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 184. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], 73–74. My understanding of CFW’s approach to her depression has been informed by Sarah Berry, who has generously shared with me the draft of an article she is writing on the subject.