I just watched a fascinating video of a recent discussion between the biographers Hermione Lee of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and Gary Giddins of the Levy Center for Biography in New York. I was glued to every 1 hour and 5 minutes of it. Hermione Lee was so engaging and absolutely thrilling in her wide-ranging discussion of what she called the…
My class finished our discussion of East Angels last night. I was afraid they wouldn’t like the ending and would find the heroine rather contrived, but they did not. Having read The Portrait of a Lady first and understanding how Woolson was responding to and revising James in East Angels made it so much more meaningful and gave us a useful frame for…
Today I have been writing about Constance’s and Henry James’s visit to Stonehenge, in the autumn of 1884. It was so cold and blustery that they could barely speak to each other. On the way back to her lodgings in Salisbury, their carriage had to pull off the road and cower in a ditch for a half hour while the wind roared overhead.…
I have been rereading Woolson’s 1886 novel East Angels with my class on Henry James and the Women Who Influenced Him. I haven’t taught one of Woolson’s novels before because they are not in print. But now there is a reprint of the original novel available by a publisher called Forgotten Books. It’s not perfect, and the students have complained that the type…
Today is Connie’s birthday. She was born in 1840, one-hundred and seventy-three years ago. My great-great-great grandfather was born in 1838. So that would put Connie back only five generations from me. Hard to believe! Shortly after Connie was born, scarlet fever struck the Woolson household, in Claremont, NH, and three of her older sisters died. Two survived the epidemic. The baby Connie…