Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  19. CFW to Winifred Howells, May 11, 1883, CL, 253.

  20. Rebecca L. Tabber, Letters of a Family: Clarke Family Relations 1822 to 1889 (master’s thesis, SUNY-Oneonta, 1997), 26–28, copy at Research Library, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter, Sept. 5, [1883], CL, 265.

  21. “Register of Deaths, September 1877 to January 1888,” book 1, Health Department, City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Records Office. The record was found by Sandra Woolson. I am grateful to Gary Woolson for providing me with the information.

  22. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145. See deed dated May 26, 1882, and “Daily Real Estate Record” in Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to SM, Jan. 10, [1883], CL, 224.

  23. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 269.

  24. Ibid.

  25. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 269, 270. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1883?], CL, 268.

  26. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1883?], CL, 268. HJ to Grace Norton, Jan. 19, [1884], HJL3, 20. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270.

  27. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Oct. 14, 1883, HJL3, 10. HJ to WDH, Feb. 21, 1884, HJL3, 28. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270. French Ensor Chadwick to JH, Jan. 20, 1884, Brown.

  28. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270.

  29. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 274. Leon Edel, “Search for an Anchorage,” HJL3, 3.

  30. HJ to Grace Norton, July 28, [1883], HJL2, 424.

  31. CFW to SM, Jan. 20, [1884], CL, 272. JH to SM, May 10, 1884, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 275.

  32. HJ to WDH, Feb. 21, 1884, HJL3, 29. HJ to Mrs. Humphry Ward, Dec. 9, [1884], HJL3, 59.

  33. CFW to JH, [June 1884?], CL, 279. CFW to JH, [May 1884?], CL, 280. CFW to Mrs. Howells, July 15, [1884], CL, 283.

  34. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, Mar. 29, 1884, CL, 277.

  35. CFW to Mrs. Howells, July 15, [1884], CL, 283. HJ to Elizabeth Boott, [June 2], 1884, HJL3, 44.

  36. HJ to Francis Parkman, Aug. 24, [1884], HJL3, 48. CFW to SM, Sept. 14, [1884], CL, 286.

  37. CFW to KM, [Oct. 21, 1884], CL, 288.

  38. Ibid., 289.

  39. Account in CFW’s handwriting in the margins of her copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (Boston: Houghton, 1886), 262, Rollins.

  40. “Miss Woolson’s Stories,” Harper’s Bazar 19 (Nov. 20, 1896): 758. “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” microfilm (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980), Butler Library, Columbia University, Aug. 1883 and Apr. 1885, reel 33, F1. CFW to JH, Apr. 29, [1885], CL, 297. Unfortunately, the agreement for the serial rights of East Angels has not survived. For her next novel, Jupiter Lights, she received $3,500, presumably the new price. See agreement in “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” Oct. 15, 1889, reel 2, vol. 5.

  41. Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 244. Georgia Krieger, “East Angels: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Revision of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady,” Legacy 22 (2005): 18–29. Geraldine Murphy, “Northeast Angels: Henry James in Woolson’s Florida,” in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894, ed. Kathleen Diffley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 232–48.

  42. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” in Partial Portraits (1888); reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 170. Gorra discusses James’s exploration of “the drama of the interior life” in Portrait of a Novel, xvi. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Through One Administration (Boston: J. Loring, 1883), 55, 64.

  43. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190. CFW, East Angels, 346.

  44. CFW, East Angels, 498, 549, 551.

  45. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 305. CFW to SM, Mar. 14, [1893], CL, 506. She describes here her process for writing each of her novels. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517.

  46. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins. “On the Writing of Novels,” The Critic 221 (Mar. 24, 1888): 139.

  47. CFW, East Angels, 551. CFW to Elinor Howells, [Summer 1883?], CL, 296. Although Sharon Dean dates this letter [1884?], it appears to belong with those she wrote during the summer after they had been together in Italy. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 275. CFW to JH, [June 1884?], CL, 280.

  48. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304.

  49. CFW to Emily Vernon Clark, n.d., CL, 550–51.

  50. CFW to Mary Gale Carter, Oct. 14, [1885], CL, 299.

  51. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Feb. 23, 1886], CL, 307. CFW to Katharine Loring, Oct. 9, [1886?], CL, 316. J. Burney Yeo, Climate and Health Resorts (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), 635.

  52. Copy of The Bostonians inscribed “Constance Fenimore Woolson from Henry James. London Feb. 20th 1886,” University of Basel.

  53. Alice and William James quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 238.

  54. Strouse, Alice James, 259. Alice James quoted in Strouse, Alice James, 185, 259. CFW, undated fragments, BHS. The references to “your brother,” who is suffering from jaundice in Venice, indicates that the letter was written to Alice James in April 1887.

  55. HJ quoted in Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), xiii. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 302. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Jan. 7, [1886], HJL3, 107.

  56. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Feb. 23, 1886], CL, 307.

  CHAPTER 10: Home Found

  1. CFW to KM, Apr. 30, 1886, CL, 311, 312.

  2. Ibid., 312.

  3. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 314. HJ to J. R. Osgood, Apr. 18, [1885], HJL3, 77.

  4. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 314. Linda Simon, “Diagnosing the Physician: Patients’ Evaluation of Nineteenth Century Medical Therapeutics,” in Revue Angliciste de l’Université de la Réunion, Alizes/Trade Winds (Automne 2003); http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/352.html.

  5. CFW to KM, Apr. 30, 1886, CL, 312.

  6. HJ to FB, May 25, [1886], HJL3, 119–20.

  7. CFW always referred to “Miss Greenough” without reference to her first name. I have been able to identify her as Louisa from Nathalia Wright’s “Henry James and the Greenough Data,” American Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1958): 338–43. Her brother Henry had married Francis Boott’s sister, and Lizzie grew up with many Greenough cousins. See Carol M. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1992), 189. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 321. CFW to FB, Feb. 7, [1890], Duveneck Family. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 313.

  8. CFW to Katharine Loring, Oct. 9, [1886?], CL, 316.

  9. CFW to ECS, Feb. 24, [1887], CL, 332. I use CFW’s name for the villa, Brichieri, although it was also known as the Villa Brichieri-Colombi.

  10. CFW to SM, Mar. 18, [1886], CL, 308. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 321–22.

  11. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 322.

  12. HJ called her “Fenimore” only in letters to Francis and Lizzie Boott. It is possible the name was a kind of joke between them because of Louisa Greenough’s fascination with her illustrious ancestry. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Oct. 18, [1886], HJL3, 136, 135. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138.

  13. HJ to FB, Nov. 4, [1886], Houghton. MS Am 1094. HJ to FB, Aug. 15, [1886], HJL3, 130. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138.

  14. CFW to FB, Jan. 9, [1891], and CFW to FB, Sept. 17, [1890], Duveneck Family.

  15. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. CFW’s letters to FB, Duveneck Family.

  16. The poem reads:

  French constancy; a marsh; & “I” beyond

  Nor “I” alone. Still “more,” yet not the whole

  Only in part a name, which, to complete

  Some think can only be a cooper’s rôle.

  No, rather the embroiderer’s. So let

  A skillful hand produce the tamb
our-frame,

  Set the wools on, & end with them the name,

  A name they’ll ne’er dishonor. Far from that!

  They’ll add to it, increase its world-wide fame.

  FB, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” taped into a copy of Benedict II in the Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Another version of the poem appears in Benedict II, 301.

  17. Josephine W. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher (San Francisco: John Howell-Books, 1970), ch. 9.

  18. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, ch. 10; quote from William James, 112.

  19. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” 191–95.

  20. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, ch. 10; quote from Lizzie Boott, 115. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” 195.

  21. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family. HJ quoted in Mahonri Sharp Young, “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck,” American Art Journal 1 (Spring 1969), 94. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 324.

  22. Young, “The Two Worlds,” 99. HJ to Henrietta Reubell, Mar. 11, [1886], HJL3, 117.

  23. CFW to FB, Sept. 15, [1888], Duveneck Family. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, n.d., CL, 555.

  24. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138. Copy of The Princess Casamassima at University of Basel.

  25. HJ to Mr. and Mrs. William James, Dec. 23, [1886], HJL3, 151. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 335. HJ to JH, Dec. 24, [1886], Brown. The letter is also printed in HJL3, where Edel has transcribed the phrase as “a prospect on our part” (153).

  26. Rayburn Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), 159.

  27. WDH, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 73 (Aug. 1886): 477–78.

  28. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 313.

  29. Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 272. CFW to JH, Feb. 23, [1887], CL, 330.

  30. “Our Monthly Gossip,” Lippincott’s 38 (Nov. 1886): 548–50. “Mr. Howells on ‘East Angels,’ ” Christian Union 34 (July 29, 1886): 7. “Our Monthly Gossip,” Lippincott’s 39 (Jan. 1887): 179. WDH, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 79 (June 1889): 153.

  31. “A Romance of Florida,” New York Times, June 6, 1886, p. 5. “East Angels,” The Literary World 24 (July 1886): 243. “Recent Fiction,” The Independent 38 (Aug. 26, 1886): 10. “East Angels,” The Critic 6 (Sep. 4, 1886), 111. “Divorce,” Church Review 48 (Oct. 1886), 393. “Recent Novels,” The Nation 11 (Nov. 1886): 396. Horace Scudder, “Recent Novels by Women,” Atlantic Monthly 59 (Feb. 1887): 268.

  32. CFW to SM, Mar. 31, [1887], CL, 339. CFW to ECS, Feb. 24, [1887], CL, 331, 332.

  33. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 334. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (New York: James Miller, 1866), Seventh Book, 255–56. Barrett Browning visited the villa only once but was so taken with the view that she had her heroine Aurora live there.

  34. CFW to SM, Mar. 24, [1887], CL, 338.

  35. CFW to SM, Mar. 31, [1887], CL, 340. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1887], CL, 350.

  36. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 334.

  37. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 343. CFW to SM, Jan. 12, [1888], CL, 352.

  CHAPTER 11: Confrère

  1. CFW to JH, Apr. 24, [1883], CL, 223. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 248. The sentence in each is nearly identical.

  2. CFW to JH, Apr. 24, [1883], CL, 233.

  3. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 302–3.

  4. CFW to SM, Mar. 18, [1886], CL, 309. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 345. The bust now resides at Rollins, where it sits on the mantel in the English faculty lounge and, sadly, has grown discolored with dirt.

  5. “Miss Woolson. Something About the Famous Novelist and Former Clevelander,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 13, 1887, p. 5.

  6. The essay was titled “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson” when it was first published in Harper’s Weekly but was shortened to “Miss Woolson” when it appeared in Partial Portraits. For the sake of consistency, I will use the shorter title, by which it is usually referred.

  7. HJ, “William Dean Howells,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (June 19, 1886): 394–95. HJ, “Edwin A. Abbey,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (Dec. 4, 1886): 786–87.

  8. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40.

  9. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Weekly 31 (Feb. 12, 1887): 114, 115.

  10. Rob Davidson, The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 145.

  11. HJ, “The Death of the Lion” (1893), in Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon (New York: Penguin, 2001), 265. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” 114.

  12. Davidson, The Master and the Dean, 147. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” 114.

  13. HJ to FB, Mar. 15, [1887], HJL3, 176. He does not mention the nature of CFW’s presumed offense, but in the fragment cited below she wrote to Alice about him needing to stay in bed and apparently resisting the advice. Alice James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 3, [1887], in The Death & Letters of Alice James, Selected Correspondence, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Boston: Exact Change, 1997), 130. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. An undated fragment of a letter from CFW to Alice James mentions HJ’s jaundice and provides a report from Mrs. Wagniere, just returned from Venice to Florence, on his health. The fragment is in BHS.

  14. HJ paid no rent this time. See HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. HJ to Emma (Wilkinson) Pertz, [Apr.–May 1887], HJL3, 179. HJ had heard a story in Florence after his previous stay on Bellosguardo that gave him the idea for “The Aspern Papers.” He borrowed the name “Tita” for one of the characters from CFW’s Anne. See Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 212. Gordon also explains that “[i]t has been assumed that the narrator speaks for James when he resists a proposal” from the younger of the two women, “but this has served to prop a biographic premise for which there is no evidence, that Fenimore hunted a husband” (218–19).

  15. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. CFW to SM, Apr. 23, [1887], CL, 341. HJ to Edmund Gosse, Apr. 24, [1887], in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915: A Literary Friendship, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 46. HJ to Katherine Bronson, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 216.

  16. HJ to William James, May 3, [1887], HJL3, 182–83.

  17. CFW to SM, May 15, [1887], CL, 342. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 344.

  18. “Pen Picture of Mrs. Burnett,” The Richfield Springs (N.Y.) Mercury, Mar. 27, 1890.

  19. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. The lack of evidence has led James’s biographers to treat the fact of his living under the same roof with CFW in various ways. Edel, in Henry James: The Middle Years, downplayed its significance for James, stressing that his contentment and productivity had to do with his surroundings: “He had discovered, for a time, an Italian paradise” (214). The two probably took “certain of their meals together” but “lived very much as they would have lived had they been housed apart” (217). He speculated that “this pleasant and méticuleuse old maid may have nourished fantasies of a closer tie,” although HJ was oblivious to her desires (217). Fred Kaplan, in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1992), saw the arrangement in a different light: “Undoubtedly, he saw Fenimore every day. It was as much of a love affair with a woman as he was ever to have, a daily intimacy that protected daily privacy, that made no physical demands beyond courtesy, no emotional demands beyond friendship” (318). HJ to Grace Norton, Oct. 17, 1882, quoted in Tara Knapp, “Epistolary Fluidity: Privacy and the ‘False Code�
� of Letter Showing,” in Tracing Henry James, eds. Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 447, 448.

  20. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. CWB also discussed her agreement with CFW in a letter to May Harris, Benedict II, 387. CWB to KM, n.d., Benedict III, 607. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211.

  21. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill.

  22. On the subject of their love for each other, see Kaplan in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, where he writes that CFW was “a woman [HJ] could love without loving her as a woman” (313); and Paul Fisher in House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York: Macmillan, 2009), who describes HJ’s “love” for CFW as another instance of the “love that dare not speak its name,” comparing it to his unauthorized love for Paul Zhukovsky (521). CFW called HJ “Harry” in a letter to SM, Jan. 2, [1888], CL, 355. She also always called him “Harry” in her letters to Francis Boott; the first that survives is dated Aug. 7, 1888, Duveneck Family.

  23. Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (1924), ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 48. Wharton quoted in Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 213.

  24. Poems from Shelley, ed. Stopford A. Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1880), Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, Clare Benedict Library. In the published letters, I was able to find only one contemporary instance of HJ using the word confrère, in reference to himself, in a letter to Alphonse Daudet in 1884, HJL3, 46. HJ appears to have used it more liberally later in life. In CRB’s letters to Leon Edel at McGill, she always refers to HJ as “Cousin Henry.”

  25. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” Partial Portraits (1888), reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 162–63. Gordon, in A Private Life, also thinks CFW could have requested that HJ cut out the biographical material (213).