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…
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…
On a recent trip to New York I had another close encounter with Woolson when I least expected it. On my trip to England and Italy, I was specifically in search of her, and at three precise moments I felt very close to her, as if I had come upon her in the real world, and not merely in the pages of her…
I sit at my desk today, the sun shining on the banana trees outside my window, and think of Venice. I am now writing about Woolson’s last year of life. She got up at 4:30 in the morning to write. (I’m only getting up at 5:30.) She wrote until 4:00, after which she bathed in the Lido. In the evenings her gondolier (the…
Yesterday was Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Woolson never visited New Orleans, which is a shame. She wrote such amazing stories about post-Reconstruction Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. I would love to see what her keen, sympathetic eye would have seen in 1870s New Orleans. She noted many times how foreign Florida, in particular, seemed. How foreign would New Orleans have been! Woolson…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6ZnjOMsND-I I was just reading a letter in which Woolson writes about walking every afternoon through the streets of Florence or up the hillsides surrounding the city. And as she walked, she heard the church bells ringing out Ave Maria. So I did a google search and found this video. She loved the way the church bells in Italy swung out from side…
When I was in Rome last fall, I visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery where Constance is buried. The Protestant Cemetery, as it was known in the nineteenth century, is the resting place of two of the most famous writers of all time: Keats and Shelley. Although Woolson died in Venice, had lived longest in Florence, and hadn’t visited Rome for over ten years, she…
Yesterday, 119 years ago, Woolson died. The news appeared all over the U.S. and Britain, as well as in Italy, that she had fallen to her death in Venice. After a couple of days, the news began to circulate that she had not fallen but jumped. Her family rushed into print with an account from a cousin who had rushed to the scene,…