Woolson loved to find those places in America that revealed traces of a forgotten past. As Henry James said of her, “She stays at home, and yet gives us a sense of being ‘abroad’; she has a remarkable faculty of making the New World seem ancient.” She particularly liked old church yards, whose gravestones were intriguing remnants of a world long vanished. In…
So, the question has been posed, what did Woolson think of New York women? Here you go . . . “Joining the stream of ladies flowing up Broadway and Fifth avenue on a pleasant afternoon, a stranger is struck by the profusion of fur in which they are wrapped, and immediately withdraws all he has ever said against our new acquisition, Alaska, where…
Henry James was born today in 1843. He was, arguably, Constance’s closest friend during her fourteen years in Europe. Henry in the 1880s, when Constance knew him After they lived under the same roof in the Villa Brichieri on the hill of Bellosguardo outside Florence, Constance started calling him “Harry.” That was a family name, just as she was called “Connie.” Although no…
Some of Woolson’s first literary work was for the Cleveland newspaper the Herald, owned by her brother-in-law and his father, who helped her to start her career. She moved to New York (as so many writers and artists continue to do) in the winter of 1870-71 and began sending home witty letters about her observations. Here is an excerpt from her first letter,…
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…
I returned yesterday from the tenth biennial conference of the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society. As always, it was intellectually stimulating and just plain fun. The congeniality of this group of scholars is like nothing I’ve experienced before. From the founders of the society eighteen years ago to the new graduate students, everyone is supportive and eager to share their work. There is no…