Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist

by Zambak Cucok Publishing

Overview

"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James’s conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature.

Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson’s dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family’s ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father’s death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward.

Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother’s death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton’s work of the next generation.

In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson’s character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245103
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/18/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Anne Boyd Rioux, professor at the University of New Orleans, author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, and editor of Miss Grief and Other Stories, has received two National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, one for public scholarship. She lives in New Orleans.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Portraits xiii

Part 1 An Education in Womanhood (1840-1860)

1 A Daughters Country 3

2 Lessons in Literature, Life, and Death 17

3 Turning Points 37

Part 2 An Education in Authorship (1870-1870)

4 False Starts 59

5 Departures 75

6 Places 98

Part 3 A European Experiment (1879-1886)

7 The Old World at Last 119

8 The Artist's Life 140

9 The Expatriate's Life 161

Part 4 The Bellosguardo Years (1886-1889)

10 Home Found 185

11 Confrère 206

12 Arcadia Lost 223

Part 5 The Final Years (1890-1894)

13 To Cairo and Back 245

14 Oxford 264

15 The Riddle of Existence 286

16 Aftershocks 305

Epilogue: Remembrance 319

Acknowledgments 327

Notes 331

Index 371

Editorial Reviews

11/09/2015
In this thoughtful retelling of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s life, Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and president of the Woolson Society, seeks to bring the “lady novelist” out of the shadow of her great friend Henry James. Woolson had already published a short story collection, when, in 1880, she met James, who later used her as a model for characters in his fiction. Born in 1840 to a distinguished family—her mother’s family founded Cooperstown, N.Y., and her granduncle was the novelist James Fenimore Cooper—Woolson was a bookish, serious, observant child. Haunted by financial insecurity and depression as an adult, she led a peripatetic life in the U.S. and Europe, eventually settling down in Venice. All the while, Woolson sought to find a balance between society’s expectations for women and her own creative fire and drive, a dichotomy she never reconciled completely. Her lonely, ambiguous death at the age of 53—falling from the window of her Venetian palazzo, in an apparent suicide—is perhaps the most vivid reminder of the painful choices she had to make. Her work merits reexamination, and Rioux has brought to life an unjustly forgotten writer. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A fine and detailed study . . . Rioux[] makes a strong case for reassessing this contemporary and close friend of Henry James.

Katherine E McLaughlin-Renpenning

A vivid, deeply involving biography. . . . Rioux writes with captivating lucidity and conviction . . . [and] offers smart and poignant insights into why Woolson was forgotten and why her unapologetically sincere and passionate novels and stories fell so swiftly out of favor.

starred review Booklist

[Rioux] has done a substantial service to American literature with . . . a scholarly resuscitation of a writer whose literary life was caught in a gender bind, aiming ambitiously to give us a new appreciation of her life and work.

Sarah E Allison

A duet [between Rioux and Woolson] that is clear and strong and exciting. . . . [Woolson] creat[ed] a still relevant and exciting body of work that Rioux guides readers to.

A J Sautter

A remarkable picture of a bold, bright woman who paved the way for writers such as Edith Wharton, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather, and who arguably might be hailed in the same breath as Henry James and George Eliot. . . . Rioux’s biography puts the woman herself back in the center of the frame and celebrates the fact that a 19th-century female writer could choose not to marry or have children, but instead to support herself by her pen.

Janice Hamlet

Refreshing . . . [T]his gentle portrait of a woman who struggled to be true to herself as an artist adds much-needed nuance to American cultural and social history.

David Smallbone

[It’s] galling that most who remember [Woolson] today do so in connection with Henry James, who occupied murky territory somewhere between frenemy and soulmate. It’s the James legacy that Anne Boyd Rioux wrestles with most in her excellent biography. . . . [Her] complex account leaves readers with an impression of Woolson’s yearning ambition and uncertain triumph.

Chicago Tribune

Rioux successfully navigates the balancing act at the heart of any literary biography. She considers Woolson's literary works . . . within the context of her life, but never reduces Woolson's fiction to mere biographical illustration. The end result is a portrait of a complex woman who chose a literary career over family and domesticity . . . [and] an engaging combination of storytelling and scholarship.

Colin Michael Ashcroft

Anne Boyd Rioux tells her compelling story of Constance Fenimore Woolson with force and power, the very qualities once ascribed to Woolson’s own fiction. This is a beautifully researched biography of a talented American writer with a lively intellect and ambitious heart, a woman nonetheless inexorably caught in the crosshairs of nineteenth-century womanhood. The denouement, though not entirely a surprise, is devastating.

Natalie Dykstra

I’m so glad Anne Rioux has brought Constance Fenimore Woolson to our attention. This is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings to light a wonderful nineteenth-century writer—sophisticated, eloquent, and powerful—who should be much more widely known. I hope this book will make that happen.

Roxana Robinson

In this eloquent and deeply researched biography, Anne Boyd Rioux draws the portrait of a nineteenth-century ‘lady novelist’ who challenged the era’s trivialization of women writers and bias against female literary ambition. Bursting out of the Jamesian frame, Constance Fenimore Woolson comes alive as an artist and a woman.

Elaine Showalter

Anne Boyd Rioux’s new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson is a riveting portrait of a lady whose literary reputation has been undeservedly eclipsed until quite recently. Now Rioux brings her vividly back to life in a book that is both perceptive and poignant.

Sandra Gilbert

A fine work of scholarship and biographical narrative. Rioux has researched her topic exhaustively and written a compelling narrative. Her work should do much to bring attention again to Woolson’s undeservedly neglected life, career, and writings and to establish an accurate assessment of Woolson’s relationship with Henry James.

Pierre Walker

Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!

Robert D. Richardson

★ 12/01/2015
Constance Fenimore Woolson, a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, was a prolific and acclaimed 19th-century writer in her own right, penning novels and short stories set in such places as Michigan's Mackinac Island and the postbellum South. Woolson also had a close literary friendship with Henry James. Unfortunately, her significant literary contributions were forgotten within a few decades of her death in 1894. Rioux (English, Univ. of New Orleans; Wielding the Pen) attempts to remedy this oversight with this excellent biography. This work is thoroughly researched, with the author drawing from correspondence, journals, and other archival documents, as well as featuring photos and passages from Woolson's noteworthy literary works. Despite Woolson's success and welcome relocation to Europe, she struggled with deafness and severe depression. The author also had to confront the extreme male chauvinism held toward women writers in late 19th-century literary circles. Her death in Venice after a fall from a window was most likely a suicide. VERDICT An important contribution to reestablishing this long overlooked writer to her rightful place in the American literary canon, this excellent book will captivate readers interested in women's studies and late 19th-century American literature. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]—Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Library Journal

2015-11-04
A fine reappraisal of the work of the Victorian novelist and dear friend to Henry James. In this comprehensive, fleshed-out biography, author Rioux (English/Univ. of New Orleans; Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America, 2004, etc.) works back from Woolson's suicide in 1894 to consider the enormous obstacles a woman writer in her era had to overcome in the sexist American literary culture. Woolson's work was largely overshadowed by her contemporary and frequent companion James, and Rioux does not speculate idly about their relationship outside of their mutual devotion to their work, loneliness, and James' essential "underlying disdain for women writers." Indeed, Woolson grasped that disdain and even—painful as it is to modern readers—subsumed the sexist strictures of the time, declaring to James, "a woman, after all, can never be a complete artist." Yet the two novelists were serializing their work in periodicals at the same time and similarly employed intelligent, thwarted, unrealized female characters in their fiction. A product of a large Cleveland family of mostly daughters—many of whom died tragically in their youth—Woolson saw firsthand the wasted fates of mothers and wives. She narrowly "escaped" (her word) a similar fate in marriage in her late 20s before choosing the writing life over teaching (the two professions available to single women), partly due to her middle name—James Fenimore Cooper was her great uncle. Woolson was determined to make a living by her pen, and she was able to support her mother and sister, moving constantly and eventually settling in Venice—although she was plagued by depression and ill health for much of her life. Rioux delineates the toll her writing ambition took on her and how, curiously, she hid her lethal literary drive from her friend James. An intelligent, sympathetic portrait of a complicated, even tortured writer who calls for fresh readers.

Kirkus Reviews