Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist
By Anne Boyd Rioux, W.W. Norton & Company, 416 pages, $33
Miss Grief and Other Stories
By Constance Fenimore Woolson, edited by Anne Boyd Rioux, W.W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, $16
If the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson is remembered at all, it’s mostly for her dresses. And these weren’t just any dresses. These were the dark silk ones that, after her sudden death, Henry James presumably tried to drown in a Venetian lagoon, hurling them from his gondola and jabbing them with a pole to keep them from rising. But he failed, and to Woolson’s admirers his failure is symbolic: you can’t keep this good writer down.
Woolson’s latest advocate is Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans, whose very reliable “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist” resurrects her subject as a pioneering author who chose a literary career over the more conventional options of marriage and motherhood, a choice made in spite of the debilitating depressions that plagued her and her family.
Woolson’s bookish father, a prosperous New England stove manufacturer, was an insecure man whose deafness intensified his inherent melancholy, and the deaths of three of her older sisters, weeks after Woolson’s birth in 1840, so devastated her mother that she never recovered. In the aftermath, the Woolsons moved to Cleveland, but more family tragedy — the sudden deaths of two more sisters, shortly after they married — persuaded the 13-year-old Woolson to fear “the ways women gave up their health and even their lives to love and marriage”. Still, she too might have sacrificed her health to wedlock if the Civil War hadn’t robbed her of a suitor who survived the fighting only to resettle in Hawaii.
But it was the death in 1869 of her father (“the love of Constance’s life”, Rioux claims) that made Woolson a professional writer. Was it that she wished to realise his ambitions — or defy the taboo against a genteel woman’s appearance in print? We don’t know. We do know she was soon writing for “Harper’s Magazine”, producing more stories than it could possibly publish.
Appreciating Woolson as more than the smitten confidante of Henry James is laudable, though Rioux might also have considered James’s negative effect on Woolson’s later, flatter work. Her early tales are by far her strongest, at least to judge by the entries in “Miss Grief and Other Stories”, compiled by Rioux and graciously introduced by Colm Toibin. Two 1873 stories, “Solomon” and “St Clair Flats”, are particularly fine, meticulously delineating the natural beauty of eastern Ohio and the Great Lakes region, where Woolson vacationed in her youth. And they depict out-of-the-way characters who bleakly dwell in relative seclusion, wizened men and women whose lives are crabbed and gritty. “When a girl’s spirit’s once broke,” one of them remarks, “she don’t care for nothing, you know.”
Woolson also wrote stories about the post-Civil War South, where she and her mother spent winters. Published in prestigious literary magazines, these tales disturbingly suggest to a present-day reader just how much Northern liberalism colluded with Southern white supremacy. Only one of them, “Rodman the Keeper”, appears in “Miss Grief”. Posted after the war to a federal cemetery in North Carolina, which he tends with loving care, John Rodman is a former Union soldier who also attends, almost against his will, the deathbed of an impoverished Confederate soldier. “It is easier,” he discovers, “to keep the dead than the living.”
In the anthology’s fine title story, “Miss Grief”, published in 1880, Woolson turns to one of her recurring subjects, that of the artist — in this case, a tenacious female author who writes with such undeniable force that even the most successful, if supercilious, man, editing her work, can’t subdue it sufficiently for publication.
Despite the renown of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe or Fanny Fern and two of Woolson’s favourites, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Woolson seemed to internalise the prevailing prejudice against so-called literary women. As a result, there’s frequently something tepid about her prose, as if she tried to suppress her own passions to fit reigning cultural fashions.
In fact, the male character in “Miss Grief” may not represent what Rioux calls the “male literary elite” as much as Woolson’s own censorious side. Henry James would call her “conservative”, adding that “for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations”. He was referring to her subject matter; but it’s her style that’s underwater.
Why Woolson eventually muffled herself in phrases such as “hemisphere of pie” or “embowered street” isn’t quite clear. Was she a victim of bias against women, particularly women writers, as Rioux suggests, or were the causes more personal? Can we separate the two? Or, put another way, to what extent is Woolson a symbol of something else (the oppression of women; their exclusion “from the literary map”) and to what extent does she interest us for and by herself?
To argue that Woolson was deprived of opportunities is a stretch. Though most colleges of the period were all-male, she did attend both the progressive Cleveland Female Seminary for wealthy young women and a French finishing school in New York. Her brother-in-law was part owner of a Cleveland newspaper with connections to major New York publishers, and his literary editor had contacts at the “Atlantic Monthly” and other magazines. When her stories began to appear, Constance Woolson included “Fenimore” in her signature; as the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, she could claim a bankable literary inheritance.
And while Rioux rightly claims that “it would not be easy to court the favour of the male literary elite”, Woolson managed to befriend many of the most refined literary men of the day, to whom she wrote flattering and even flirtatious letters.
Woolson did, however, endure a great deal of condescension from mentors who, as she said, did “not really believe in woman’s genius”. Self-doubting but proud, increasingly deaf, more and more isolated, believing that she was unattractive (pictures of her suggest the opposite) and evidently ambivalent about her profession, Woolson travelled to Europe in 1879 after the death of her mother. There she met many prominent American expatriates, including James. Yet she remained persistently homeless, moving back and forth between Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and England. And although she published a great deal, she was plagued by a debilitating pain in her right arm, most likely psychosomatic, whenever she was working on a novel.
In December 1886, Woolson rented a villa outside Florence, and James stayed there the following spring for six weeks, occupying the downstairs apartment with a separate entrance. No doubt James and Woolson were simpatico, but when James told Edmund Gosse he was “making love to Italy”, he wasn’t referring to Woolson. Nor did she fall in love with him, as has frequently been supposed, even though these two unusual people obviously shared an enduring and deeply companionable bond. When they vacationed together in Geneva in 1888, they met for dinner but lodged in hotels a mile apart.
Whatever the friendship was, it wasn’t easy. “You do not want to know the little literary women,” Woolson wrote to James. “Only the great ones — like George Eliot. I am not barring myself out here, because I do not come in as a literary woman at all, but as a sort of — of admiring aunt.”
This is about as close as we get to Woolson’s ardour, or her anger. Except for one important incident: in Venice in early 1894, worried about her finances, exhausted after the completion of a fourth novel, weakened by illness and relying on laudanum to sleep, Constance Woolson either fell or jumped from the third-story window of her apartment. She had been delirious or she had committed suicide. A grieving James assumed both possibilities were true. Yet no one can know for sure. And so we keep poking at those unsinkable dresses, hoping to find the submerged woman who once wore them.
–New York Times News Service
Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877”. She is writing a book on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
