It hasn't been easy to keep Woolson in my life since I returned to teaching this fall. I've taught her stories "Miss Grief" and "Jeannette" in my American Literature Survey class. But presenting a paper at the South Central Modern Language Association conference here in New Orleans last week gave me the opportunity (or should I say made me make the time) to…
I wrote a couple of months ago about searching for an appropriate way to end Woolson’s biography, so I should be done with the manuscript, right? Not exactly. This summer, I have reached a new stage in my writing that is anything but the end. In some ways it feels like starting over. But really it is all just part of the process,…
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…
As I revisit the beginning of my book and consider what makes the best sort of biographical opening, a friend suggests to me that maybe when you’re writing about a woman’s life, the family part is more important than if you were writing about a man. This has sent me back to Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, first published in 1988, and…
Where should a biography begin? Now that I am in the revision stage, more or less, I’ve gone back the start of it all, which I haven’t seen in two years. Typically a life story starts with birth and a discussion of the subject’s antecedents, particularly the parents and their lineages. Rather boring stuff, usually. Yet a certain degree of family history is…
We live in an age of self-promotion: twitter, facebook--need I add blogging? A blog post by Nancy K. Miller about how Emily Dickinson might feel about our era’s publicity-consciousness got me thinking about how Woolson felt about her own literary celebrity. She loved it and hated it at the same time. She wanted recognition, but she didn’t want to ask for it and…
Woolson decided to end her life when she was fifty-three, almost fifty-four, years of age. Her last year was full of pain and worry about how she would financially and physically manage to maintain her independence. It is easy to see that there was a complex set of reasons she chose to end her life. But was it a “choice”? I have been…
Today I wrote the words that brought Woolson’s life to an end. There is still much to say about her death and its aftermath, as well as her legacy. But to type the following sentences today was deeply moving: “When the nurse returned a second time, the window was wide open. (It had been tightly closed with curtains drawn when Miss Holas had…
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…
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…