The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story is a favorite so far among my students in the "Forgotten Books" class I'm teaching this semester. It is set in the South of France in the late 1920s but was written in 1940, long after its author, Glenway Wescott, had left France. My students and I all agreed that it is a beautiful, unjustly forgotten book.…
Today I will revisit Rome, the final stop on my 2013 trip to walk in Woolson's footsteps in England and Italy. I visited the Forum, saw the Coliseum, and battled with the crowds at the Vatican. (I gave up when I leaned my head back to look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and got whacked in the head by another…
I've been reliving my trip to England and Italy to follow in Woolson's footsteps almost exactly 3 years ago. It was late October, early November, and the weather was cold and rainy pretty much nonstop. I had to buy extra layers to stay warm, but I was still freezing and wet most of the time. When I arrived in Florence, I discovered the…
I'm revisiting my trip of three years ago (almost exactly) to the sites in England and Italy where Woolson lived. You can see my first two posts about England here and here. I've been back to England again since, but Italy still haunts me. My first stop was Venice, the city that Woolson thought of as her Xanadu. Once I saw it in person, I…
The back cover copy for Miss Grief and Other Stories is here: Discover the fiction of a writer once deemed America’s “Novelist Laureate.” Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-94) was considered one of the best writers of her generation. She depicted with precise realism and great empathy a broad landscape of Americans and their ways, from the people of the rural Midwest and deep South…
I'm working on the copyedits of the manuscript now and am almost done. This is the time for scrutinizing every comma and hyphen. Here and there I add a phrase for clarity or delete a sentence that seems repetitive. But mostly it's making sure each name is spelled correctly. Today, however, I rediscovered for a moment the joy of research, when you are…
The manuscript is done—it just needs copy editing and proofing, and then it will be a book. But it seems there is one more major hurdle I hadn't counted on. After spending the last five years writing this book, everything now hangs upon getting permission to quote from the letters of the figures I’m writing about. Chief among them are, of course, Constance…
Over the past two weeks, a flurry of emails and a phone call from my editor and her assistant has signaled that the production process for my biography has begun. Incredibly, Norton had its “launch” meeting for next winter’s titles last week. It’s hard to believe that the long process has already begun, one year before the book will finally be released. Decisions…
My review of Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch was published last week on Electric Literature's blog, The Outlet. This is my first foray into non-academic reviewing. I had a lot of fun doing it and can't wait to do more. This book was particularly interesting because Woolson was a big fan of George Eliot's. I believe Eliot was her first and most lasting…
The working title for my biography of Woolson obviously refers to Henry James’s now-classic novel. Let me explain why I chose it. After reading The Portrait of a Lady, Woolson wrote to the author about his heroine, Isabel Archer, “With no character of yours have I ever felt myself so much in sympathy.” She experienced with Isabel “a perfect . . . comprehension,…