Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  9. CFW to ACW, undated fragment, CL, 561. CFW to Mary Gale Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 335. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514.

  10. Review of Rodman the Keeper, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 31 (May 1880): 635. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” in Partial Portraits (1888); reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 164.

  11. “Recent Fiction,” New York Times, June 11, 1880. CFW to Barnett Phillips, Aug. 6, [1881?], CL, 177. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 75.

  12. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL 42.

  13. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia.

  14. CFW, “In the South,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 7, 1874. Although many have assumed the cemetery in “Rodman” was modeled on Andersonville, there is no evidence CFW ever visited there. CFW, “Rodman the Keeper,” in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1971), 40.

  15. Review of Rodman the Keeper, Christian Union 21 (Apr. 14, 1880), 350. The religious family magazine, edited by Henry Ward Beecher, published the fiction of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Edward Eggleston, and others. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877], CL 91. CFW to ECS, Sept. 16, [1877], 100–101.

  16. CFW to PHH, [Apr. 17, 1876], CL, 67.

  17. CFW to PHH, Sept. 10, [1876], CL, 76.

  18. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 71.

  19. CFW to SM, n.d., CL, 548. CFW to PHH, [Nov. 1, 1875], CL, 54.

  20. CFW to SM, Jan. 30, [1877?], CL, 88. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 90. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. No letters from Charlie have survived.

  21. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 90.

  22. The common co-occurrence of migraines and manic depression (bipolar disorder) is discussed in Birk Engmann, “Bipolar Affective Disorder and Migraine,” Case Reports in Medicine (2012), Article ID 389851. http://www.hindawi.com/crim/medicine/2012/389851/. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 124.

  23. CFW to ECS, May 27, [1877], CL, 92. CFW to ECS, Sept. 16, [1877], CL, 100.

  24. CFW to SM, May 20, [1892], CL, 476. CFW to ECS, June 10, [1877], CL, 92.

  25. CFW to ECS, Sept. 11, [1877], CL, 96–97. CFW to ECS, Sept. 30, [1877], CL, 101–2.

  26. HW to SM, Dec. 23, 1877, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW dated her letters from Hibernia, Clay County, Florida, which she said was an island in the St. Johns River. She must have meant Hibernia Plantation on Fleming Island, just north of Green Cove Springs.

  27. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, 1883, CL, 267. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days, Her Home There and Her Friends,” New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1889, p. 11.

  28. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 62–63. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 83. Sharon Dean dates the letter 1876, but internal evidence indicates it was written in 1875. CFW Notebooks, Benedict II, 96.

  29. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 45 (Sept. 1877): 365, 366; 40 (Nov. 1877): 617; 42 (July 1878): 116.

  30. HJ, “Mr. and Mrs. Fields,” in The American Essays of Henry James, 278. In the three years leading up to Anne’s run, novels in Harper’s were serialized for between six months (HJ’s Washington Square) and thirteen months (Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native).

  31. CFW, Anne, 2, 3. CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 492.

  32. CFW, Anne, 91, 472, 348, 380.

  33. CFW, Notebooks, Benedict II, 103. CFW, Anne, 318, 361.

  34. According to J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8, CFW wrote to him about Anne: “The end as I wrote it was very different. I changed it to suit my mother. I am not quite satisfied with it.”

  35. CFW to ECS, May 5, [1878], CL, 106. CFW to ECS, Jan. 15, [1879], CL, 109.

  36. CFW to ECS, Jan. 15, [1879], CL, 109. HW to Mathers, Dec. 1878, Benedict I, 255.

  37. Benedict I, 255.

  38. CWB to Kate Mather, n.d., Benedict III, 613–14.

  39. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126. CFW to ECS, Mar. 14, [1879], CL, 110.

  40. CFW, “Mrs. Edward Pinckney,” Christian Union 20 (Aug. 6, 1879), 106, 107.

  41. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1880], CL, 147.

  CHAPTER 7: The Old World at Last

  1. CFW to KM, Dec. 22, 1879, CL, 118.

  2. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 58.

  3. “Hearing with One’s Teeth,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1879. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 116.

  4. CFW to KM, Dec. 22, 1879, CL, 118–19. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 125.

  5. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 114. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 129. CFW to SM, Apr. 13, [1880], CL, 131.

  6. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 124. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126.

  7. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 123. See also CFW to KM, Feb. 23, 1880, CL, 126–27.

  8. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 127–28. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1881?], CL, 180.

  9. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” in Stories by American Authors, vol. 4 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 7, 9, 13, 19.

  10. Ibid., 21.

  11. Ibid., 34.

  12. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 49. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 52. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 61. CFW to PHH, Feb. 13, [1876], CL, 63. Roderick Hudson ran in the Atlantic Monthly Jan.–Dec. 1875 ; The American ran June 1876–May 1877; and “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” appeared in Dec. 1876. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (Apr. 1875): 490.

  13. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 6. CFW and HJ would meet in April 1880. As magazine issues appeared in the month preceding their actual date, the May issue of Lippincott’s would have hit the shelves in April. I discuss these issues more fully in Anne E. Boyd, “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief,’ ” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 192–93.

  14. Leon Edel, Henry James, A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 177. JH, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (March 1879): 399–400.

  15. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 117. CFW uses the first person plural, indicating she and Clara, and perhaps Clare, called on him together.

  16. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 47.

  17. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 37.

  18. Review of Two Women: 1862, Appletons’ Journal 2 (June 1877), 570–71. A clipping of the review is pasted into CFW’s copy of Two Women at Rollins, with the name “E. L. Burlingame” in CFW’s hand. CFW to R. R. Bowker, June 19, [1875?], CL, 27.

  19. CFW to ECS, May 5, [1878], CL, 105. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 23.

  20. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 185–86. Richard Grant White, “Recent Fiction,” North American Review 128 (Jan. 1879): 104. We can’t know whether Woolson read this review, but she was an avid reader of criticism. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 23.

  21. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (Jan. 1879): 106, 107.

  22. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (Feb. 1879): 259. HJ, “The Art of Fiction,” in Partial Portraits (1888; London: Macmillan, 1894), 394.

  23. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 130. CFW, “At Mentone,” Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 79. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, May 12, 1880, CL, 137. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.

  24. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 128.

  25. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.

  26. CWB indicates they met HJ at the Casa Molini. See Benedict III, 588.

  27. HJ to WDH, Apr. 18, [1880], HJL2, 285. As Lyndall Gordon has written, CFW’s “restlessness fitted his evolving idea of Isabel Archer, who travelled like a thirsty person draining cup after cup. Independent, new to Europe, full of impressions, Miss Woolson provided a complementary model for his Americana.” A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and
His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 162.

  28. HJ to Catharine Walsh, May 3, [1880], Houghton, MS Am 1094.1330. HJ to Alice James, Apr. 25, [1880], HJL2, 288.

  29. CFW to unidentified recipient, CL, 136. HJ, “Italy Revisited. 1877,” in Portraits of Places (Boston: Osgood, 1884), 57. CFW to SM, June 8, [1880], CL, 139.

  30. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 135, 134.

  31. Leon Edel compared HJ’s ease with CFW to that he felt with his mother or sister. See Leon Edel, Henry James, 1870–1881: The Conquest of London (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 415. I rely on Edel periodically, as HJ’s foremost biographer, to flesh out HJ’s personality and whereabouts, although his portrait of CFW and her relationship to HJ is deeply flawed. HJ to William James, June 28, [1877], HJL2, 119. Edmund Gosse, in Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), 27, describes HJ as “grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and frightened.” CFW to SM, June 8, [1880], CL, 139. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.

  32. CFW to unidentified recipient, CL, 136. Stammering mentioned by CRB in an interview with “D.H.L.,” Sept. 7, 1952, McGill.

  33. CFW, “A Florentine Experiment,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (Oct. 1880): 509.

  34. Ibid. 523, 524.

  35. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161, 160.

  36. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Aug. 28, 1880], CL, 147. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Aug. 23, [1881?], CL, 179.

  37. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 160–61.

  38. CFW to SM, Dec. 19, [1880], CL, 156.

  CHAPTER 8: The Artist’s Life

  1. CFW to KM, June 21, 1880, CL, 143–44.

  2. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145. CFW to SM, Aug. 28, [1880], CL, 146.

  3. Review of Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, Spectator 53 (June 19, 1880), 24. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145–46.

  4. “Editors’ Table,” Appletons’ Journal 9 (July 1880): 95–96. “Southern Sketches,” The Literary World 3 (July 1880): 223. Review of Rodman the Keeper, Harper’s 61 (June 1880): 152.

  5. Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Some Recent Novels,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (July 1880), 125.

  6. CFW to SM, Dec. 19, [1880], CL, 156. CFW to SM, Oct. [1880], CL, 150.

  7. CFW to KM, Jan. 16, 1881, CL, 159. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Apr. 8, [1881], CL, 162–63. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 160.

  8. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Apr. 8, [1881], CL, 162.

  9. CFW to KM, Easter Even, 1881, CL, 165. CFW’s copy of Karl Baedeker’s Italie Centrale (in French) (1881) is at Rollins. CFW, “The Roman May, and a Walk,” The Christian Union, reprinted in Benedict II, 251.

  10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821). CFW to J. H. A. Bone, Mar. 18, 1881, in “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8.

  11. CFW to ECS, [Aug. 11, 1881], CL 172–73. CFW to KM, Easter Even, 1881, CL, 165. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 252. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 187–88.

  12. CFW, “The Roman May, and a Walk,” 249–50. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 629.

  13. CFW to ECS, [Aug. 11, 1881], CL, 172. CFW to ECS, Aug. 4, [1882], CL, 204.

  14. CFW, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” in The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 141.

  15. Ibid., 157.

  16. Ibid., 183, 193.

  17. CFW to ECS, Aug. 4, [1882], CL, 205.

  18. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211–12. CFW to HJ, Feb. 23, [1882], CL, 191. HJ to Grace Norton, Nov. 7, [1880], HJL2, 314.

  19. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” in Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 262.

  20. Madame de Staël, Corrine, or Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 90, 301.

  21. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” 267, 268, 240.

  22. HJ, “Felix Holt, The Radical,” The Nation 3 (Aug. 16, 1866): 128. HJ, “George Sand,” The Galaxy 24 (July 1877): 59. “His views of American women writers had a tone ranging from condescension to outrage,” writes Alfred Habegger in Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9.

  23. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 188.

  24. “Literary Notes,” The Critic 1 (Jan. 29, 1881): 7.

  25. Harper & Brothers to CFW, Feb. 22, 1882, in J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 484–85. Contract in “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” microfilm (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980), Butler Library, Columbia University, reel 2, vol. 4, p. 301.

  26. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211. HJ had a similarly dispiriting effect on other writers as well. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to him of the “despair” he felt after reading his work. He felt “a lout and slouch of the first water” compared to HJ. Quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 125.

  27. Atlantic’s circulation in Ellery Sedgwick, A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 127. Harper’s circulation in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1938), 6. Sales figures for Portrait in Michael Gorra, The Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 239. Sales figures for Anne in Rayburn Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), 159.

  28. Literary World and Critic quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132, 126. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 186–88.

  29. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190.

  30. “Miss Woolson’s ‘Anne,’ ” The Century 24 (Aug. 1882): 636.

  31. “Recent American Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly 50 (July 1882): 111–12. Review of Anne, Californian 6 (Sept. 1882): 287. Others quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement that ran nationally and was reprinted in the back of For the Major (Harper & Brothers, 1883).

  32. New York Tribune quoted in Harper & Brothers advertisement. “The Native Element in American Fiction,” The Century 26 (July 1883): 364.

  33. Quoted in Harper, The House of Harper, 484.

  34. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 256.

  35. CFW to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, June 30, [1882], CL, 203.

  36. ECS to CFW, Nov. 12, 1882, CL, 567.

  37. ECS to CFW, Nov. 12, [1882], CL, 567–68.

  38. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 255–56.

  39. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 207.

  40. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 206–7. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 220.

  41. Benedict III, 495. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 207.

  42. CFW to Hamilton Wright Mabie, June 18, [1883], CL, 258. CFW to ECS, Apr. 30, [1883], CL, 240.

  43. “Recent Fiction,” Overland Monthly 11 (Aug. 1883): 212. The Boston Globe quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement that ran nationally and in the back of most of her subsequent books. “New Publications,” New York Times, June 16, 1883, p. 3. Review of For the Major, The Independent 35 (Aug. 2, 1883): 11. Sales figures in Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 159.

  44. CFW, For the Major, 159, 162.

  45. Ibid., 188.

  46. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” 270.

  47. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 357.

  48. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 185. Inscribed copy of The Portrait of a Lady at the University of Basel.

  CHAPTER 9: The Expatriate’s Life

  1. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 208.

  2. CFW to ECS and Flora Mather, Sept. 18, [1882], CL, 215.

  3. CFW to KM, Dec. 10, [1882], CL, 154. Sharon Dean dates this letter as 1880, but
internal evidence suggests 1882.

  4. JH, “Clarence King,” Address of John Hay (New York: The Century, 1906), 348. HJ quoted in Robert Wilson, The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007), 15.

  5. King quoted in Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 2009), 124. Sandweiss extensively documents King’s secret marriage.

  6. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 534. JH quoted in Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 114.

  7. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.

  8. CFW to KM, [Dec. 10, 1882], CL, 154, 155.

  9. CFW to Clara Stone Hay, Jan. 8, [1883], CL, 220. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 249.

  10. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.

  11. HJ quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 115. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 249.

  12. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 223, 224.

  13. CFW to Elizabeth Gwinn Mather, Apr. 25, 1883, CL, 236. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.

  14. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 223. CFW to SM, July 18, [1881], CL, 169.

  15. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 246.

  16. Ibid., 252.

  17. Ibid., 252, 247.

  18. Ibid., CL, 251. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 256–57. Without HJ’s half of the correspondence, his biographers have tended to assume that her deep affection for him was one-sided. However, CFW was much too sensitive to pursue a friendship that was unreciprocated. That he was capable of tremendous affection is evidenced by his letters to Grace Norton; see Leon Edel’s multivolume collection of letters as well as the letters in Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. Susan E. Gunter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). As Gunter explains in her introduction, “his letters to these women were warmly human” rather than “withdrawn,” as HJ has often been portrayed (11).