Miss Grief and Other Stories (2 page)

“In Sloane Street,” written in 1892, eighteen months before Woolson's death, takes this idea of a triangle of two women and a man a step further. Philip Moore, a novelist, and his wife, who whines, are traveling with their two children and an old friend, Gertrude Remington, who, in Lyndall Gordon's words, “reads deep books, wears tailor-made gowns, and pins back her hair plainly.”
¹¹

What is most notable about the story is its dry command. The dialogue hovers between making the speakers seem ghastly and suggesting that they are in deep pain. Every moment of the story increases the tension. The narrative line
moves underneath the action until slowly it surfaces as the story of Miss Remington's isolation. We watch her feeling slighted by Moore's remarks about women writers. But, more important, as the Moores unite, emerging as a married couple, Miss Remington's status as a single woman makes her seem vulnerable, utterly alone. It is Constance Fenimore Woolson's great gift that this is done without any obvious effort or display, but with much subtlety, controlled sympathy, and writerly skill.

INTRODUCTION

by Anne Boyd Rioux

 

D
URING HER LIFETIME, THE WORDS MOST COMMONLY
used to describe the writings of Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) were: “original,” “powerful,” “vigorous,” “artistic,” “sympathetic,” “true,” and “real.” She wrote five novels for adults and dozens of stories and was often compared with Henry James and George Eliot. The leading magazine and book publisher Harper & Brothers sought and received an exclusive contract with her. Her work was considered by many to be superior to that of any living American woman writer, and some believed she deserved the title of America's “novelist laureate.” Henry James paid tribute to her in his collection
Partial Portraits
(1888), discovering in her stories about the Reconstruction-era South “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” In her landmark essay, “Woman in American Literature” (1890), Helen Gray Cone summed up Woolson's reputation: “Few American writers of fiction have given evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature—these seem fitting words [to describe her]. Women have reason for
pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.”
¹

When Woolson died in 1894, at the age of fifty-three, after falling from her third-story window in Venice, her friend and editor Henry Mills Alden called her “a true artist” whose writings possessed a “rare excellence, originality, and strength [that] were appreciated by the most fastidious critics.” In the
New York Tribune
, the influential poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, comparing her with Jane Austen and the Brontës, called her “one of the leading women in the American literature of the century.” Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and collaborator with Mark Twain, declared her “one of the first in America to bring the short story to its present excellence,” and wrote that her death was “deplored by the entire literary fraternity of this country.”
²

Nonetheless, Woolson's stellar reputation faded quickly. Already in 1906, a reader wrote to
The New York Times
, “Miss Woolson has done too much for America and Americans to be forgotten and ignored.” A tribute to her written by the Irish novelist Shan F. Bullock in 1920 suggests the particular value she had to those few who remembered her: “I venture to say that no writer living compares in power and art with Constance Woolson. …Had she lived, it is possible that in time she would have forced acknowledgment from a public that refuses even common notoriety to anything save commercial success. …But Miss Woolson, it seems, is forgotten. No one remembers her name, even.”
³

At the height of her career, Woolson had managed that difficult combination of critical and commercial success. Yet none of her novels was as successful as her first,
Anne
(1882),
which sold 57,000 copies, nearly ten times as many as Henry James's
The Portrait of a Lady
, published a few months earlier. Some critics, most influentially William Dean Howells, had criticized her portraits of women, charging her with a lack of realism and/or morality, and had objected to the difficult themes of her later work, which tackled such subjects as domestic abuse and love outside of marriage. Still, these cannot explain the precipitous decline of her reputation. The growing suspicion in the modern era of expressions of genuine emotion quickly dated her work, which did not shy away from the portrayal of restrained passion and eruptions of powerful emotions, even though these were never the dominant themes of her work. Of even greater influence was the tendency by male critics to classify all women writers as minor as the American literary canon took shape at the turn of the century.
⁴
Throughout the twentieth century, the narrative of separate literary spheres for men and women persisted, creating a neat split between the major male realists (such as James and Howells) and the minor female regionalists (such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman). Woolson's work, which participated in both movements and crossed the gendered divides of her own day, fell through the cracks of the dominant narrative of American literary history.

Nonetheless, Woolson's name was kept alive by a small cadre of appreciative critics from the 1920s through the 1960s, when Henry James's biographer Leon Edel discovered that she was a significant figure in the famous author's life and made her name once again more widely known.
⁵
Yet Edel had dragged Woolson out of the shadows only to belittle her as a second-rate writer who had tried to ride the Master's coattails.
Feminist scholars, many of whom discovered Woolson through their research on James, helped to repair the damage by confirming the artistic and cultural value of her work and examining her pathbreaking life.
⁶
Yet her friendship with James continues to overshadow her own significance as a writer, and the fact that her life ended in probable suicide has eclipsed her earlier accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a tragic victim of the male literary world's (and her friend James's) neglect.

Another disadvantage for Woolson's reputation has been the fact that she cannot be aligned with one particular region, such as Jewett's Maine or Kate Chopin's Louisiana. Woolson traveled widely, and her writings reflect the breadth of her experience and vision. Her earliest stories were set in the Great Lakes region, near where she grew up, in Cleveland. After 1873, she set many of her stories in the Reconstruction-era South, particularly Florida, where she spent the winters with her invalid mother. After moving to Europe in late 1879, Woolson continued to set her novels in America but also wrote stories about American expatriates in Italy, Switzerland, and England. As a result, she was a pioneering regionalist without a region to call her own.

Coming of age as a writer at the same time as American literary realism, Woolson also made important contributions to that movement that have been greatly overlooked. She always insisted that her writings were taken directly from life as she observed it, which for her included characters' hidden emotional lives, in addition to their inner consciousness or their social interactions, the usual terrain of most male realists. In his remembrance of her, Warner perfectly captured
the essence of her achievement when he wrote, “She was a sympathetic [and] refined observer, entering sufficiently into the analytic mode of the time, but she had the courage to deal with the passions, and life as it is.”
⁷

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, then a village of New England emigrants. Her parents moved there from New Hampshire shortly after her birth in 1840. She was the sixth child but would, by the age of thirteen, be the oldest survivor of the Woolson children, which also included a younger daughter and son. Despite so much sorrow, her parents were loving and nurtured her interests in literature and history. She was especially close to her father, Charles Jarvis Woolson, a stove manufacturer by trade and an avid reader, who had been a journalist in Boston and Charlottesville, Virginia, in the 1830s. He gave twelve-year-old Constance a complete set of Charles Dickens's works and encouraged her early writing, none of which has survived. Her mother, Hannah Pomeroy Woolson, was a niece of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose example would exert a great influence on Constance's career. However, it was her mother's poor health, exacerbated by her grief for her lost children, that left a greater impression on Constance, who would grow up to be her mother's caretaker.

After some early setbacks in the Woolson stove business, the family led an upwardly mobile and socially well-connected life in Cleveland. The Woolsons also had a summer home on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, and Constance and her father often visited Zoar, the Ohio German separatist
community, both of which would become important settings for her early writing. Constance was a precocious reader and writer, but her family saw those activities as decidedly domestic. She was raised to be a cultured, well-educated young woman who would make a fine wife and mother someday. Even though she received a nearly college-level education at the Cleveland Female Seminary, her parents sent her, at seventeen, for a year of finishing school in New York and upon her graduation showed her off at Eastern resorts in hopes of finding her a husband. Woolson accepted her family's view of her future, but she was also ambivalent about the overpowering nature of romantic love for women. During the Civil War, when Woolson was in her early to mid-twenties, she came under the spell of what she would later call “the glamor of the war” and fell in love with Zephaniah Spalding, an officer whom she had known from her summers on Mackinac Island.
⁸
She expected to marry him; however, after the war, he moved to Hawaii, where he married a sugar heiress. It would be many years before Constance came to terms with the loss of her hopes for marriage and a family.

In the meantime, Constance had become the sole caretaker of her ailing parents. Then, when her father died in 1869, she lost her main emotional support. Unfortunately, he also left her and her mother without enough money to support themselves, and it soon became clear that she would have to find a way to earn a living. With the encouragement of her brother-in-law, George Benedict, part-owner of the
Cleveland Herald
, Woolson began publishing the writing she had been doing largely in secret. In July 1870, her first two publications, both travel sketches, appeared, in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
and
Putnam'
s Magazine
, two of the leading monthlies of the day. Soon she was sending witty and observant letters home from New York for publication in the
Herald
. After returning to Cleveland, she also published a children's novel,
The Old Stone House
(1873), but soon decided to pursue her greater ambition for serious recognition as a literary artist, publishing a series of Great Lakes stories in the
Atlantic Monthly
,
Appletons' Journal
,
Scribner's Monthly
, and
Harper's
.

Due to their limited funds and her mother's ill health, Constance moved South in late 1873, staying over the next five years in Florida, both Carolinas, and Virginia. She explored the wild environs of St. Augustine, Florida, where she and her mother spent their winters, often delving into the swamps and pine barrens on her own. They also encountered white Southerners' resentment of Northerners who flocked to the South in search of economic opportunity or a warmer climate. Everywhere, the scars of the Civil War were visible, in the dispirited faces of the people and in the cemeteries full of unmarked graves.

In February 1879, after her mother died from a short illness, Constance descended into a deep depression. She felt as if she had lost the one person in the world who gave her life purpose. Having suffered during the 1870s a few periods of acute depression, a tendency that she inherited from her father, Constance now faced a severe battle with what she once called “this deadly enemy of mine.”
⁹
She had also inherited her father's congenital deafness, which was now becoming severe and would increase her sense of isolation and exacerbate her tendency toward depression.

Hoping to break up Constance's grief, her sister Clara
decided to take her to Europe. They sailed in December 1879, and in Europe Woolson finally began to enjoy her new identity as an independent author. Meeting Henry James in Florence, in April 1880, she found a new friend to help deflect her grief. He found her amiable, despite being hard of hearing, and showed her around the galleries and gardens of Florence. She had hoped to meet him as something of a peer, but he had never heard of her and treated her chivalrously as a woman rather than respectfully as a fellow writer. It would take many more years of friendship, but eventually he would call her his “confrère.”
¹⁰

Choosing not to return to the United States with her sister, Woolson stayed on in Europe, spending the winters in Florence or Rome and the summers in Switzerland, England, and Germany, getting to know many of the prominent British and American visitors and expatriates. Although her deafness was beginning to become a distinct social liability, Woolson still made many new friends in the early 1880s, among them William Dean Howells and his family. When the whirl of expatriate society threatened to encroach on her writing, she would often retreat from it to concentrate on her work.

In 1887, Woolson finally settled down in Europe, renting her own villa outside of Florence. There she became close to Henry James's friends the American composer Francis Boott and his daughter, Lizzie, who was an artist and had recently married Frank Duveneck, her former art teacher. When the newlyweds had a child nine months later, Woolson was chosen to be his godmother. Enjoying the companionship of these de facto family members and the comforts of her own home, Woolson experienced the greatest contentment of her adult
life, balancing writing in solitude with a supportive community. In the spring of 1887, James also came to visit and lived for a month under her roof in the downstairs apartment, during which time they began to develop a quasi-sibling relationship that would grow in the coming years.