New Thoughts on Biography

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…

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Digging for the “real” Woolson

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…

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Portraits of the Author

Most photographs of Woolson were taken with her turned away from the camera. She was exceptionally self-conscious about her appearance. But she was no George Eliot. No one ever reported that she was unattractive. All images of her indicate that she had a pleasant appearance. That she didn’t like her own looks is understandable, though. How many women have felt the same way? What…

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“So sweet a place”

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…

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A Street in Venice

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,…

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The Grief of Women Writers

I am teaching a course this semester on “Henry James and the Women Who Influenced Him.” We’ll be looking at Minnie Temple, Woolson, and Edith Wharton, and reading quite a bit of biography alongside the fiction and critical works. So we started the semester last week with two essays on the pitfalls and virtues of biographical criticism. What does it mean to read…

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Is the biographer necessarily a vulture?

In 1878, Woolson wrote a poem called “To Certain Biographers” in which she condemned the vogue of tell-all biographies that exposed famous men’s vices and weaknesses. She wrote, We give you Scanty thanks for all your labors; yes, Doubtless ye write truth, for barren places Are upon the mountains; none the less Are they mountains, and their silent grandeur Scorns your petty skill,…

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Beautiful View

The picture I chose for this blog masthead is the view from Woolson’s villa where she lived for three years in the late 1880s. Can you imagine waking up to that view every day? I took the picture last October. I was in Florence visiting some of the galleries and other sites Woolson loved. One afternoon (when it finally stopped raining), I took…

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Getting Started

First things first. Who was Constance Fenimore Woolson? Maybe you have heard of the story "Miss Grief." Maybe you have heard about her close friendship with Henry James. Maybe you read something once about how she committed suicide in Venice in 1894. In any case, if you have heard of her, you're probably thinking, didn't she have a tragic life? Wasn't she some…

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