The following abbreviations are used in the notes.
PEOPLE
| ACW | Arabella Carter Washburn |
| CFW | Constance Fenimore Woolson |
| CRB | Clare Rathbone Benedict, CFW’s niece |
| CWB | Clara Woolson Benedict, CFW’s sister |
| ECS | Edmund Clarence Stedman |
| FB | Francis Boott |
| HJ | Henry James |
| HW | Hannah Pomeroy Woolson, CFW’s mother |
| JH | John Hay |
| KM | Katharine Mather, CFW’s niece |
| PHH | Paul Hamilton Hayne |
| SM | Samuel Mather, CFW’s nephew |
| WDH | William Dean Howells |
| WWB | Dr. William Wilberforce Baldwin |
WORKS
REPOSITORIES
| BHS | The Loring Collection, Beverly Historical Society, Beverly, MA. |
| Brown | The John Hay Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI. |
| Columbia | Edmund Clarence Stedman Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. |
| Cornell | Daniel Willard Fiske Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections, The Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. (The cited letters are undated. I have provided the appropriate years whenever possible.) |
| Dartmouth | Curtis Family Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. |
| Houghton | Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. |
| McGill | Edel Papers, McLennan Library, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. |
| Pierpont Morgan | William Wilberforce Baldwin Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY. |
| Rollins | The Clare Benedict Collection of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL. |
| University of Basel | English Department, University of Basel, Switzerland. |
| UVA | The Papers of Henry James, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. |
| WRHS | Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH. |
A full bibliography of CFW’s publications as well as criticism on her work can be found at http://constancefenimorewoolson.wordpress.com/.
PROLOGUE: Portraits
1. Examples are too numerous to mention. Sheldon M. Novick’s comment in a footnote to his retelling of the story of HJ’s drowning of CFW’s dresses in Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 554, indicates its pervasiveness: “I have not found confirmation of this improbable story, but as it has become canonical I include it here.”
2. Copy of The Portrait of a Lady at University of Basel. CFW to Flora Payne [Whitney], [1863/1864?], CL, 2.
3. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 64.
4. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 188. The latter is CFW’s description of Isabel.
5. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 362.
6. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190.
CHAPTER 1: A Daughter’s Country
1. Clara, who would be born after Constance, wrote that their mother “never could talk about those days,” Benedict I, 42.
2. Benedict I, 42.
3. Benedict I, 164. Benedict III, 11.
4. CFW to O. F. R. Waite, Aug. 15, 1892, CL, 485.
5. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 94–101. Maurice Joblin, Cleveland Past and Present: Its Representative Men (Cleveland, OH: Maurice Joblin, 1869), 400–402. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304.
6. O. F. R. Waite, History of the Town of Claremont, New Hampshire (Manchester, NH: John B. Clarke Company, 1895), 498–99. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74. Benedict I, 127. CFW, “The Bones of Our Ancestors,” Harper’s 47 (Sept. 1873): 535–43.
7. Richard Cooper to James Fenimore Cooper, Aug. 2, 1831, Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Fenimore Cooper (grandson), vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 236.
8. “We have never had any likeness of him which was satisfactory,” CFW wrote to O. F. R. Waite, Aug. 15, 1892, CL, 484. “Death of Chas. J. Woolson,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Aug. 6, 1869. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Cooper, Apr. 5, 1847, Cooper family. Benedict I, 100, 107.
9. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 151.
10. Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 315–16, 330–34.
11. James Fenimore Cooper to HW, Apr. 19, 1840, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Beard, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 29–30.
12. Fenimore was CFW’s great-grandmother’s maiden name. James added it to his name legally in 1826, having promised his mother to carry on the name, which would have otherwise died out.
13. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 375. Benedict I, 17.
14. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 301, 304–5, 308.
15. Hannah Pomeroy [Woolson] to William Cooper, Oct. 18, 1828, James Fenimore Cooper Collection, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
16. Ibid.
17. Benedict I, 158–60, 148–49.
18. The 1850 census shows three Irish servants living in the Woolson household, and the 1860 census two German “domestics.” CFW was “carefully instructed” in domestic arts, she wrote to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 420.
19. Benedict I, 161. Benedict III, 215, 511. CWB to KM, July 26, 1905, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Levi Crosby Turner, “Auto-Biographic,” Diaries of Levi Crosby Turner, Research Library, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY.
21. Turner, “Auto-Biographic,” 18. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Cooper, Mar. 15, 1847, Cooper family. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 98.
22. HW, Journal, Benedict I, 167–214.
23. Benedict I, 42; ellipses in original. Cornelia E. L. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Connie Anderson, great-great-niece of CFW.
24. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 303. Notes in CFW’s copy of James Russell Lowell, My Study Windows (Boston: Houghton, 1886), 19, Rollins. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 367. CFW, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s 45 (Sept. 1872): 520.
25. CFW, “The South Shore of Lake Erie,” Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 526. Anthony Trollope, North America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 158. John Fiske quoted in William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World, 1950), 304. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson.”
26. Joblin, Cleveland Past and Present, 385. George Quartus Pomeroy made Jarvis an “innocent victim of a long series of frauds and deceptions,” according to “Forgery, &c.,” The Cleveland Herald, May 5, 1845. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, July 31, 1851, Cooper Family.
27. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 97. CFW to H. H. Boyesen, Aug. 9, [1881?], CL, 171.
28. Oliver Payne, the brother of her friend Flora Payne; Zephaniah Swift Spalding; and Samuel Livingston Mather.
CHAPTER 2: Lessons in Literature, Life, and Death
1. Benedict I, 165–66. “Died,” The Cleveland Herald, Jan. 31, 1846.
2. Benedict I, 166.
3. Benedict II, 16. Quotes from Hannah in Benedict I, 166.
4. Mrs. W. A. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, Philanthropic, Educational, Literary, Medical and Artistic (Cleveland: W. A. Ingham, 1893), 270. Benedict I, 64.
5. Benedict II, xiv. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1881?], CL, 180. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, 271. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days, Her Home There and Her Friends,” New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1889, p. 11. The close friend interviewed was probably Arabella Carter.
6. CFW to Mary Gale Carter Clarke, July 24, [1884], CL, 284.
7. Benedict II, xv. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.” Sarah D. Hobart, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Advance 18 (Oct. 18, 1883): 684.
8. Benedict II, xv. CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 494. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 54.
9. The parlor’s description is taken from Anne March [CFW], The Old Stone House (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1873), 64. She used her family’s home, the former Irad Kelley mansion on Euclid Avenue, as a model, according to J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8, and Cornelia E. L. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Connie Anderson, great-great-niece of CFW. C. A. Urann, Centennial History of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1896), 62–63. CFW, “The Editor’s Sanctum,” ch. 3, The Old Stone House.
10. George Pomeroy Keese, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, NY), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3. Georgiana’s poem, Benedict I, 75. Hannah’s journal, Benedict I, 167–214. Georgiana’s journal, Benedict I, 78–84.
11. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.”
12. “Notices of Publications Received,” The Ohio Cultivator (Columbus) 9 (April 15, 1855): 120. Grannis quoted in Edward A. Roberts, Official Report of the Centennial Celebration of the Founding of Cleveland and the Settlement of the Western Reserve (Cleveland: Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1896), 185. “Mrs. Arey’s Poems,” Western Literary Messenger 24 (May 1855): 122.
13. “Editorial Notes—American Literature,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 3 (Feb. 1854): 222. Hawthorne quoted in the Introduction to Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), xv.
14. Woolson family volume of Harper’s in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Mrs. C. S. Hall, “Memories of Miss Jane Porter,” Harper’s 1 (Sept. 1850): 433.
15. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74. CFW, The Old Stone House, 378.
16. Benedict I, 97. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, 271.
17. Benedict I, 67. CFW, The Old Stone House, 163.
18. C. Jarvis Woolson to W. H. Averell, Benedict I, 67.
19. C. Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, July 31, 1851, Cooper Family. Georgiana Woolson Mather to Mrs. Thomas Mather, Aug. 30, 1851, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Typo in obituary of Rev. Lawson Carter, New York Times, July 16, 1868. HW, “A Ghost Story,” Benedict I, 220. See also Emma Woolson Carter to “Louisa,” Mar. 15, 1852, Benedict I, 68–69.
21. Benedict I, 68. CFW to “Louisa,” n.d., CL, 1. Although Sharon Dean dates this letter in the 1840s, it must have been written when Emma came home after her husband’s death. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
22. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2011), 31–33. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 16–17.
23. Terry S. Reynolds, Iron Will: Cleveland Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847–2006 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 4. Hannah Peabody Chandler Woolson to CFW, n.d., CL, 565. Benedict I, 71.
24. Poem in Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Georgiana Woolson Mather to Samuel Livingston Mather, July 3, 1853, Benedict I, 85–87. Benedict I, 71.
25. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 107.
26. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 89.
27. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, Feb. 13, 1846, and Mar. 5, 1850, Cooper Family. Clara’s description of her mother is in the thinly veiled portrait of Mrs. Barstow in her pseudonymous novel, Agnes Phelps, One Year at Boarding-School (Boston: Loring, 1873), 10.
28. Michael J. McTighe, A Measure of Success: Protestants and Public Culture in Antebellum Cleveland (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 30. CFW, The Old Stone House, 230–31.
29. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.”
30. CFW, The Old Stone House, 211–12, 38.
31. CFW to Samuel Mather, Oct. 31, 1890, CL, 425. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family.
32. Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 39.
33. CFW, The Old Stone House, 254.
CHAPTER 3: Turning Points
1. Letter to the Editor, “Rockwell St. School Examinations, &c.,” The Cleveland Herald, Mar. 17, 1853.
2. Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, ed., Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872 (New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898), 92. Circular and Catalogue of the Albany Female Academy. 1848 (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1848). Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 3–25.
3. First Annual Catalogue of the Cleveland Female Seminary, Cleveland, Ohio 1854–1855 (Cleveland: Sanford & Hayward’s, 1855), 15. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464.
4. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421.
5. Linda T. Guilford, “The Teacher’s Disappointments,” The Ohio Educational Monthly. A Journal of School and Home Education, new ser., vol. 1 (1860): 200. Linda Thayer Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, From 1848 to 1881 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1890), 74.
6. CFW to Linda Guilford, Mar. 1, [1887] and [1891], CL, 336, 464. Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, 76–77.
7. Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, 77–78. CFW to PHH, [April 17, 1876], CL, 67. CFW to Linda Guilford, Mar. 1, [1887], CL, 336.
8. CFW to William Whitney, Feb. 25, [1893], CL, 502.
9. Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 37–44.
10. Julia Gardiner quoted in Van R. Baker, ed., The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836–1853 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2000), 13. CFW, Anne (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 151, 157. CFW used Madame Chegaray’s as the model for Madame Moreau’s school in Anne.
11. CFW to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Aug. 9, [1881?], CL, 171. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 56.
12. CFW, “The Bones of Our Ancestors,” Harper’s 47 (Sept. 1873): 535–43. CFW, Anne, 154, 155.
13. CFW, Anne, 157. Benedict I, 292.
14. Benedict I, 292.
15. Benedict III, 518.
16. CFW to Flora Payne, [1863/64], CL, 2.
17. David Van Tassel, “Behind Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2006), 19, 28–32. The Woolsons lived at 288 Prospect St., and Lucy Bagby at 151. “Mr. Lincoln’s Reception,” Cleveland Morning Leader, Feb. 14, 1861, p. 1.
18. CFW, Anne, 353–54.
19. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441.
20. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 9.
21. Anne March [CFW], The Old Stone House (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1873), 139.
22. Sebastian Hubert Lukasik, “Military Service, Combat, and American Identity in the Progressive Era” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008), 84. Annals of Cleveland, vol. 44, 1861 (Cleveland: WPA Project, 1938), 131. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535.
23. David Stephen Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 1744. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48. “The March of the Seventh—Letter from a Cleveland Boy,” Cleveland Morning Leader, May 4, 1861, p. 2.
24. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441. CFW, “A Flower of the Snow,” The Galaxy 27 (Jan. 1874): 77, 78. In a letter to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535, CFW indicated that she and Zeph had planned to marry. She imagined that if they met again each would think, “Great heavens—what an escape I had!”
25. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia. Concert program in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Sept. 21, 1861, p. 3. CFW to ECS, July 8, [1877], CL, 94. Mary Clark Brayton and Ellen F. Terry, Our Acre and Its Harvest: Historical Sketch of the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, 1869), 285. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” Harper’s 44 (Jan. 1872): 234.
26. “Major Zeph Swift Spalding,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 11, 1862. “A Terrible Scene,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Nov. 4, 1862, p. 3. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” 235, 234. Report of Lieut. Col. Zephaniah S. Spalding, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 1, 572–75, Ancestry.com.
27. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” 235. Jessee Hawes, Cahaba: A Story of Captive Boys in Blue (New York: Burr, 1888), 14–16. Rufus Spalding, who became a U.S. congressman, later reported on his son’s experience to the House of Representatives: “Mr. Spalding and the Million Dollar Resolution,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Mar. 25, 1867.
28. CFW to Hamilton Mabie, June 18, [1883], CL, 258. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48. J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 226.
29. Sandol Stoddard, “Biography of Col. Spalding,” Earl Arruda Papers, Kauai Historical Society. “Leasing of Abandoned Plantations,” Nashville Daily Union, Mar. 9, 1864, p. 1. Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many?: Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War–Era Tennessee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 535.
30. I was unable to verify Zeph’s whereabouts from the end of the war until 1867, but his wartime leasing of plantations and his later post as a cotton planter in Hawaii strongly suggest he had gone south. Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 145–46. Cheryl Torsney, “Zephaniah Swift Spalding: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Cipher,” in Kathleen Diffley, ed., Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 114–15.
31. CFW signed herself “Miss Constance Woolson, spinster” on a letter published in the Cleveland Herald on Feb. 2, 1869.
32. CWB, fragment of letter, no recipient, n.d., Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Benedict III, 615, 621.
33. CFW, “Cicely’s Christmas,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Dec. 30, 1871): 758. CFW, “Wilhelmina,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (Jan. 1875): 44–55. Torsney, “Zephaniah Swift Spalding,” 124.
34. CFW, “Hepzibah’s Story,” in Robert Gingras, “ ‘Hepzibah’s Story’: An Unpublished Work by Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Resources for American Literary Study 10 (Spring 1980): 33–46. The manuscript of this story, previously in the archives at Rollins College, has been lost. Gingras explains that the address 131 St. Clair Street was written on the manuscript, indicating that it was written between 1871 and 1873, when Constance lived there.
35. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535.
36. CFW, “Heliotrope,” Harper’s 47 (July 1873): 274. CFW, “The Lady of Little Fishing,” Atlantic Monthly 34 (Sept. 1874): 303. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441.
37. CFW to Flora Payne, [1863/64], CL, 2. “Mrs. William C. Whitney,” Harper’s Weekly 37 (Feb. 18, 1893): 148. Flora Payne’s letters to William C. Whitney, typed excerpts, in William C. Whitney Papers, Library of Congress.
38. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 3.
39. Ibid. The only surviving record of the marriage is in their son Philip Carter Washburn’s application to the Sons of the American Revolution, Ancestry.com. CFW to Jane Carter, Jan. 13, [1888], CL, 352.
40. “Criminal,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Mar. 31, 1869. “Suicide,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Mar. 31, 1869, p. 3.
41. Benedict I, 110. CFW to unknown recipient, Aug. 24, 1871, CL, 6–7.
42. “Death of Chas. J. Woolson,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Aug. 6, 1869. Mrs. W. A. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work (Cleveland: W. A. Ingham, 1893), 272.
43. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1890], CL, 425.
44. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304. CFW, For the Major (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), 73.
1. CFW’s first three publications were on these topics. CFW, “An October Idyl,” Harper’s 41 (1870): 907.
2. J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer (Feb. 4, 1894), p. 8. G.P.K. [George Pomeroy Keese], “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, NY), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3.
3. “Co-Partnership Notice,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Aug. 12, 1870. “Real Estate Transfers,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Aug. 29, 1870. “A Successful Author’s Advice,” The Ladies’ Home Journal 13 (Aug. 1896): 12. CFW to Elizabeth Mather, Dec. 4, [1874], CL, 23.
4. William F. G. Shanks, “Woman’s Work and Wages,” Harper’s 37 (Sept. 1868): 548. According to Marian J. Morton, Women in Cleveland: An Illustrated History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 58, female teachers earned $659/year in 1875.
5. Shanks, “Woman’s Work and Wages,” 548. “Editor’s Easy Chair” (July 1867); S. E. Wallace, “Another Weak-Minded Woman” (Nov. 1867); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “What Shall They Do?” (Sept. 1867), all reprinted in Anne E. Boyd, Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 228–42.
6. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8.
7. Ibid.
8. Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: The Making of a Modern Publisher (1967; New York: Harper, 2010), 78. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8.
9. CFW, “An October Idyl,” Harper’s 41 (1870), 907, 911. Idyl is misspelled. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 4.
10. CFW, “The Haunted Lake,” Harper’s 44 (Dec. 1871): 21, 23, 26.
11. CFW to Edward Everett Hale, Dec. 1, 1871, CL, 8.
12. See letters from Samuel L. Mather to SM, July 12, 1870, and July 23, 1870, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
13. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 88. Gary Scharnhorst, “James and Kate Field,” Henry James Review 22, no. 2 (2001): 200–206.
14. CFW, “New York,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Jan. 10, 1871. CFW, “Gotham,” Supplement to the Daily Cleveland Herald, Jan. 14, 1871.
15. CFW’s letters from Nov. 1870 through early Feb. 1871 are headed with the address No. 49 W. 32nd St. See CL, 5. Mark D. Hirsch, William C. Whitney: Modern Warwick (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948), 47. CFW, “Gotham.”
16. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 549.
17. CFW, “Gotham.” CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 549. CFW, “New York.”
18. CFW, “Gotham.”
19. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 114. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 57.
20. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” Harper’s 44 (Jan. 1872): 231–36. CFW, “Cicely’s Christmas,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Dec. 30, 1871): 758.
21. CFW to ACW, [1870/71], CL, 4.
22. “The New Hamburg Disaster,” Harper’s Weekly (Feb. 25, 1871). CFW to WWB, Oct. 5, [1890], CL, 422.
23. “Thy Will Be Done”: George S. Benedict, privately printed, Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS, 81, 19–21.
24. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, n.d., CL, 560. CFW, “Hepzibah’s Story,” in Robert Gingras, “ ‘Hepzibah’s Story’: An Unpublished Work by Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Resources for American Literary Study 10 (Spring 1980): 45. CFW, “The Flower of the Snow,” The Galaxy 27 (January 1874): 81, 83.
25. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, n.d., CL, 560. J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. “A Day of Mystery,” Appletons’ Journal 6 (Sept. 9, 1871): 290–93. Benedict III, 622. W. S. Robison and Co.’s Cleveland Directory, 1871–1872 (Cleveland: W. S. Robison, 1871), 479.
26. Estimate of CFW’s earnings based on typical rates of pay provided by Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 13–14. Mott posits “$2,000 as a minimum income for moderate comfort” in the period from 1865 to 1885. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. A note inside a copy of Agnes Phelps [CWB], One Year at Our Boarding-School (Boston: Loring, 1873) in the Clare Benedict Collection at the WRHS explains the circumstances of its production, including the fact that it was published “without remuneration.”
27. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464.
28. CFW to SM, Apr. 11, [1891], CL, 448. Susan Coolidge [Sarah Woolsey], What Katy Did (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 35–36. CFW to Mary Mapes Dodge, Sept. 13, [1888?], CL, 359.
29. Hannah called it “a stirring account of ‘the boys’ pranks,” referring to Sam Mather, Charlie Woolson, and the Carter boys. HW to SM, May 15, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
30. “Book Notices,” The Youth’s Companion 46 (Mar. 27, 1873): 103. New York Mail quoted in “There Are Two Kinds of Juvenile Books,” The Cleveland Morning Daily Herald, July 9, 1873.
31. CFW quoted in Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” p. 8. According to “Our Youth,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, June 14, 1873, CFW also wrote a serial called “Along the Slowgo” for a Cleveland children’s magazine, Our Youth, which I have not been able to locate.
32. “One Year at Our Boarding-School,” North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia), Dec. 25, 1873, p. 1. Phelps [CWB], One Year at Our Boarding-School.
33. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464. On the lack of American women writers’ recognition as serious artists before Woolson’s generation, see Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
CHAPTER 5: Departures
1. CFW to unknown recipient, Aug. 24, 1871, CL, 6–7. CFW to R. R. Bowker, May 31, 1873, CL, 10.
2. Reviews quoted in “We fancy the story of ‘Solomon,’ . . . ” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Sept. 23, 1873. CFW to WDH, Oct. 27, [1873?], CL, 11. CFW to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, June 30, [1882], CL, 203. “The Absence of Women at the Whittier Dinner,” New York Evening Post, reprinted in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 28, 1877, p. 2.
3. CFW to ACW, [1874?], CL, 26. CFW to Miss Farnian, Apr. 17, 1875, CL, 33.
4. CFW to WDH, Oct. 27, [1873?], CL, 11.
5. CFW, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s 45 (Sept. 1872): 522. “Literary,” Appletons’ Journal 13 (Apr. 3, 1875): 438.
6. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. “Ballast Island” prefigures themes in Margaret Wilkins Freeman’s “New England Nun” (1891) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
7. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161.
8. WDH, Their Wedding Journey, Atlantic Monthly 28 (Sept. 1871): 354–55. Review of Their Wedding Journey, North American Review 114 (Apr. 1872): 444. Benedict II, 97.
9. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859; Toronto: Broadview, 2005), 241–42, 239.
10. CFW to Roberts Brothers, Nov. 12, [1870], CL, 4. George Sand, The Devil’s Pool, trans. Andrew Brown (1846; London: Hesperus Classics, 2005), 6, 7, 8. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins; quote from Paul Bourget. Clara Benedict, fragment inside a copy of For the Major, Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.
11. CFW, “Solomon,” in Castle Nowhere (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875), 238, 265.
12. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 87.
13. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 44.
14. CFW to SM, Apr. 25, [1875], CL, 34. CFW to ECS, Apr. 13, [1874], CL, 11–12. CFW to ECS, Sept. 7, [1874], CL, 16.
15. “The Magazines for September,” The Nation 19 (Sept. 3, 1874): 157. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (June 1875): 737.
16. Samuel Clemens to Olivia Langdon Clemens, Apr. 26, 1873, Hartford, CT. Online at TheMarkTwainProject.org (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00909). Bryant Morey French concluded Warner probably borrowed from CFW’s “Weighed in the Balance” (June 1872). See Mark Twain and the Gilded Age: The Book That Named an Era (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965), 295.
17. CFW to James R. Osgood, Oct. 22, [1874], CL, 19. CFW, “St. Clair Flats,” in Castle Nowhere, 306, 332, 348. WDH, “Recent Literature,” 737.
18. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. Sharon Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 17. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 30.
19. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (June 1875): 736, 737. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL, 43.
20. CFW to ACW, [1875], CL, 87.
21. “Literary,” Appletons’ Journal, 439. “Fiction in a New Field,” New York Tribune, Mar. 6, 1875, p. 8.
22. Samuel L. Mather to SM, Dec. 21, 1872, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
23. HW to Mrs. Samuel L. Mather, Nov. 19, 1873, Rollins. SM to Samuel L. Mather, Oct. 22, 1873, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW, “A Letter from Miss Woolson,” The Cleveland Daily Herald, Dec. 18, 1873.
24. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 213.
25. CFW, “A Letter from Miss Woolson.” HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
26. Today Hospital Street is called Aviles Street, and the Fatio House is the Ximenez-Fatio House Museum. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 6. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
27. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to ACW, n.d., CL, 25.
28. CFW, “Ferns,” unpublished poem in Cheryl B. Torsney, “Fern Leaves from Connie’s Portfolio,” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 185. CFW, “The French Broad,” Harper’s 50 (Apr. 1875): 623. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74.
29. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 366. CFW, “Pine-Barrens,” Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 66.
30. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, 18, 22.
31. Ibid., 18.
32. Ibid., 7. CFW, “Felipa,” Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1971), 209.
33. The term “Boston marriages,” referring to relationships between women who lived together as a married couple, was widely used after the publication of HJ’s The Bostonians in 1886. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 42 (Oct. 1878): 503. Some have seen in such literary portrayals in “Felipa,” Anne, and Horace Chase the suggestion that CFW herself had homosexual desires. See Kristen Comment, “The Lesbian ‘Impossibilities’ of Miss Grief’s ‘Armor,’ ” Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, 207–8. This is possible, although I have found no concrete evidence to support the idea.
34. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, 14; pt. 2, Harper’s 50 (Jan. 1875): 172. CFW, “King David,” in Rodman the Keeper, 274.
35. Quoted in Robert J. Scholnick, Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1977), 5.
36. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, vol. 1 (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1901), 504. “Constance Fenimore Woolson. Her Work and Personality,” New York Tribune (Jan. 28, 1894), p. 14.
37. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 84. Sharon Dean dates this letter as 1876, but internal evidence indicates it was written in 1875.
38. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 2, 179, 180. CFW to ECS, Apr. 13, [1874], CL, 11. CFW to ECS, Sept. 7, [1874], CL, 16. ECS to CFW, Sept. 2, 1889, CL, 569.
39. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 17. CFW to ECS, Sept. 30, [1877], CL, 101.
40. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 28.
41. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 83.
42. Page 114 of CFW’s copy of Victorian Poets, in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.
43. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 72.
44. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to R. R. Bowker, Jan. 19, [1875], CL, 27.
45. CFW to PHH, May Day, 1875, CL, 36. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 73. Excerpts of reviews on the back page of Two Women: 1862. A Poem, by CFW (New York: D. Appleton, 1877). Review of Two Women: 1862, The Independent 29 (June 21, 1877), 9.
46. Page 121 of CFW’s copy of Victorian Poets, in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS.
47. See Jay Hubbell, “Some New Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The New England Quarterly 14 (Dec. 1941): 715–35; quotes from Hayne on 716–17.
48. CFW to PHH, Feb. 13, [1876], CL, 64. CFW to PHH, [Apr. 17, 1876], CL, 66–67.
49. CFW to PHH, Aug. 26, [1875], CL, 50. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 17.
50. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 73.
51. CFW to ECS, Jan. 20, [1875], CL, 30. Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashions, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 76–78. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1875], CL, 75. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 86.
52. CFW to ACW, [1876?], CL, 86.
CHAPTER 6: Dark Places
1. CFW to ECS, [Sept. 6, 1874], CL, 16. CFW, “In the South,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 7, 1874. CFW, “The French Broad,” Harper’s 50 (Apr. 1875): 618–19. HW to unidentified recipient, May 28, [1874], Benedict I, 250.
2. CFW to Elizabeth Gwinn Mather, Dec. 4, [1874], CL, 21. CFW, Horace Chase (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 17.
3. CFW to SM, Apr. 25, [1875], CL, 34. CFW, “Up the Ashley and Cooper,” Harper’s 52 (Dec. 1875): 1–24.
4. CFW to PHH, Aug. 26, [1875], CL, 49–50. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 51. CWB to KM, 1921, Benedict III, 223. CFW wrote a long poem she never published that was inspired by the trip: “Gettysburg, 1876,” Benedict III, 224–25.
5. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 51–52. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48.
6. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 52. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 53.
7. CFW to ECS, Dec. 2, [1875], CL, 82. Dean dates this letter 1876, but internal evidence suggests 1875. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 62.
8. CFW to ACW, undated fragment, CL, 561. It is possible that CFW suffered from manic depression. Her intense work habits and frequent travels may be evidence of manic episodes. Clinical symptoms of depression outlined by the American Psychiatric Association in Michael B. First et al., DSM-IV-TR Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., Text Revision (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004), 187. Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 184. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], 73–74. My understanding of CFW’s approach to her depression has been informed by Sarah Berry, who has generously shared with me the draft of an article she is writing on the subject.
9. CFW to ACW, undated fragment, CL, 561. CFW to Mary Gale Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 335. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514.
10. Review of Rodman the Keeper, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 31 (May 1880): 635. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” in Partial Portraits (1888); reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 164.
11. “Recent Fiction,” New York Times, June 11, 1880. CFW to Barnett Phillips, Aug. 6, [1881?], CL, 177. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 75.
12. CFW to WDH, June 28, [1875], CL 42.
13. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia.
14. CFW, “In the South,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 7, 1874. Although many have assumed the cemetery in “Rodman” was modeled on Andersonville, there is no evidence CFW ever visited there. CFW, “Rodman the Keeper,” in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1971), 40.
15. Review of Rodman the Keeper, Christian Union 21 (Apr. 14, 1880), 350. The religious family magazine, edited by Henry Ward Beecher, published the fiction of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Edward Eggleston, and others. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877], CL 91. CFW to ECS, Sept. 16, [1877], 100–101.
16. CFW to PHH, [Apr. 17, 1876], CL, 67.
17. CFW to PHH, Sept. 10, [1876], CL, 76.
18. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 71.
19. CFW to SM, n.d., CL, 548. CFW to PHH, [Nov. 1, 1875], CL, 54.
20. CFW to SM, Jan. 30, [1877?], CL, 88. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 90. HW to SM, Jan. 3, 1874, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. No letters from Charlie have survived.
21. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 90.
22. The common co-occurrence of migraines and manic depression (bipolar disorder) is discussed in Birk Engmann, “Bipolar Affective Disorder and Migraine,” Case Reports in Medicine (2012), Article ID 389851. http://www.hindawi.com/crim/medicine/2012/389851/. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 124.
23. CFW to ECS, May 27, [1877], CL, 92. CFW to ECS, Sept. 16, [1877], CL, 100.
24. CFW to SM, May 20, [1892], CL, 476. CFW to ECS, June 10, [1877], CL, 92.
25. CFW to ECS, Sept. 11, [1877], CL, 96–97. CFW to ECS, Sept. 30, [1877], CL, 101–2.
26. HW to SM, Dec. 23, 1877, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW dated her letters from Hibernia, Clay County, Florida, which she said was an island in the St. Johns River. She must have meant Hibernia Plantation on Fleming Island, just north of Green Cove Springs.
27. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, 1883, CL, 267. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days, Her Home There and Her Friends,” New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1889, p. 11.
28. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 62–63. CFW to ECS, Dec. 12, [1875], CL, 83. Sharon Dean dates the letter 1876, but internal evidence indicates it was written in 1875. CFW Notebooks, Benedict II, 96.
29. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 45 (Sept. 1877): 365, 366; 40 (Nov. 1877): 617; 42 (July 1878): 116.
30. HJ, “Mr. and Mrs. Fields,” in The American Essays of Henry James, 278. In the three years leading up to Anne’s run, novels in Harper’s were serialized for between six months (HJ’s Washington Square) and thirteen months (Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native).
31. CFW, Anne, 2, 3. CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 492.
32. CFW, Anne, 91, 472, 348, 380.
33. CFW, Notebooks, Benedict II, 103. CFW, Anne, 318, 361.
34. According to J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8, CFW wrote to him about Anne: “The end as I wrote it was very different. I changed it to suit my mother. I am not quite satisfied with it.”
35. CFW to ECS, May 5, [1878], CL, 106. CFW to ECS, Jan. 15, [1879], CL, 109.
36. CFW to ECS, Jan. 15, [1879], CL, 109. HW to Mathers, Dec. 1878, Benedict I, 255.
37. Benedict I, 255.
38. CWB to Kate Mather, n.d., Benedict III, 613–14.
39. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126. CFW to ECS, Mar. 14, [1879], CL, 110.
40. CFW, “Mrs. Edward Pinckney,” Christian Union 20 (Aug. 6, 1879), 106, 107.
41. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1880], CL, 147.
CHAPTER 7: The Old World at Last
1. CFW to KM, Dec. 22, 1879, CL, 118.
2. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 58.
3. “Hearing with One’s Teeth,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1879. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 116.
4. CFW to KM, Dec. 22, 1879, CL, 118–19. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 125.
5. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 114. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 129. CFW to SM, Apr. 13, [1880], CL, 131.
6. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 124. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126.
7. CFW to SM, Jan. 25, [1880], CL, 123. See also CFW to KM, Feb. 23, 1880, CL, 126–27.
8. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 127–28. CFW to PHH, Feb. 16, [1880], CL, 126. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1881?], CL, 180.
9. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” in Stories by American Authors, vol. 4 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 7, 9, 13, 19.
10. Ibid., 21.
11. Ibid., 34.
12. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 49. CFW to PHH, Sept. 12, [1875], CL, 52. CFW to PHH, Jan. 16, [1876], CL, 61. CFW to PHH, Feb. 13, [1876], CL, 63. Roderick Hudson ran in the Atlantic Monthly Jan.–Dec. 1875 ; The American ran June 1876–May 1877; and “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” appeared in Dec. 1876. WDH, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 35 (Apr. 1875): 490.
13. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 6. CFW and HJ would meet in April 1880. As magazine issues appeared in the month preceding their actual date, the May issue of Lippincott’s would have hit the shelves in April. I discuss these issues more fully in Anne E. Boyd, “Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief,’ ” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 192–93.
14. Leon Edel, Henry James, A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 177. JH, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (March 1879): 399–400.
15. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1879], CL, 117. CFW uses the first person plural, indicating she and Clara, and perhaps Clare, called on him together.
16. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 47.
17. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 37.
18. Review of Two Women: 1862, Appletons’ Journal 2 (June 1877), 570–71. A clipping of the review is pasted into CFW’s copy of Two Women at Rollins, with the name “E. L. Burlingame” in CFW’s hand. CFW to R. R. Bowker, June 19, [1875?], CL, 27.
19. CFW to ECS, May 5, [1878], CL, 105. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 23.
20. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 185–86. Richard Grant White, “Recent Fiction,” North American Review 128 (Jan. 1879): 104. We can’t know whether Woolson read this review, but she was an avid reader of criticism. CFW, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” 23.
21. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (Jan. 1879): 106, 107.
22. CFW, “Contributors’ Club,” Atlantic Monthly 43 (Feb. 1879): 259. HJ, “The Art of Fiction,” in Partial Portraits (1888; London: Macmillan, 1894), 394.
23. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 130. CFW, “At Mentone,” Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 79. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, May 12, 1880, CL, 137. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.
24. CFW to SM, Mar. 20, [1880], CL, 128.
25. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.
26. CWB indicates they met HJ at the Casa Molini. See Benedict III, 588.
27. HJ to WDH, Apr. 18, [1880], HJL2, 285. As Lyndall Gordon has written, CFW’s “restlessness fitted his evolving idea of Isabel Archer, who travelled like a thirsty person draining cup after cup. Independent, new to Europe, full of impressions, Miss Woolson provided a complementary model for his Americana.” A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 162.
28. HJ to Catharine Walsh, May 3, [1880], Houghton, MS Am 1094.1330. HJ to Alice James, Apr. 25, [1880], HJL2, 288.
29. CFW to unidentified recipient, CL, 136. HJ, “Italy Revisited. 1877,” in Portraits of Places (Boston: Osgood, 1884), 57. CFW to SM, June 8, [1880], CL, 139.
30. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 135, 134.
31. Leon Edel compared HJ’s ease with CFW to that he felt with his mother or sister. See Leon Edel, Henry James, 1870–1881: The Conquest of London (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 415. I rely on Edel periodically, as HJ’s foremost biographer, to flesh out HJ’s personality and whereabouts, although his portrait of CFW and her relationship to HJ is deeply flawed. HJ to William James, June 28, [1877], HJL2, 119. Edmund Gosse, in Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), 27, describes HJ as “grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and frightened.” CFW to SM, June 8, [1880], CL, 139. CFW to Mary Crowell, [Spring 1880], CL, 134.
32. CFW to unidentified recipient, CL, 136. Stammering mentioned by CRB in an interview with “D.H.L.,” Sept. 7, 1952, McGill.
33. CFW, “A Florentine Experiment,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (Oct. 1880): 509.
34. Ibid. 523, 524.
35. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161, 160.
36. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Aug. 28, 1880], CL, 147. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 161. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Aug. 23, [1881?], CL, 179.
37. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 160–61.
38. CFW to SM, Dec. 19, [1880], CL, 156.
CHAPTER 8: The Artist’s Life
1. CFW to KM, June 21, 1880, CL, 143–44.
2. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145. CFW to SM, Aug. 28, [1880], CL, 146.
3. Review of Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, Spectator 53 (June 19, 1880), 24. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145–46.
4. “Editors’ Table,” Appletons’ Journal 9 (July 1880): 95–96. “Southern Sketches,” The Literary World 3 (July 1880): 223. Review of Rodman the Keeper, Harper’s 61 (June 1880): 152.
5. Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Some Recent Novels,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (July 1880), 125.
6. CFW to SM, Dec. 19, [1880], CL, 156. CFW to SM, Oct. [1880], CL, 150.
7. CFW to KM, Jan. 16, 1881, CL, 159. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Apr. 8, [1881], CL, 162–63. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Feb. 5, [1881], CL, 160.
8. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Apr. 8, [1881], CL, 162.
9. CFW to KM, Easter Even, 1881, CL, 165. CFW’s copy of Karl Baedeker’s Italie Centrale (in French) (1881) is at Rollins. CFW, “The Roman May, and a Walk,” The Christian Union, reprinted in Benedict II, 251.
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821). CFW to J. H. A. Bone, Mar. 18, 1881, in “With and Without Glasses,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8.
11. CFW to ECS, [Aug. 11, 1881], CL 172–73. CFW to KM, Easter Even, 1881, CL, 165. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 252. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 187–88.
12. CFW, “The Roman May, and a Walk,” 249–50. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 629.
13. CFW to ECS, [Aug. 11, 1881], CL, 172. CFW to ECS, Aug. 4, [1882], CL, 204.
14. CFW, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” in The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 141.
15. Ibid., 157.
16. Ibid., 183, 193.
17. CFW to ECS, Aug. 4, [1882], CL, 205.
18. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211–12. CFW to HJ, Feb. 23, [1882], CL, 191. HJ to Grace Norton, Nov. 7, [1880], HJL2, 314.
19. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” in Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 262.
20. Madame de Staël, Corrine, or Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 90, 301.
21. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” 267, 268, 240.
22. HJ, “Felix Holt, The Radical,” The Nation 3 (Aug. 16, 1866): 128. HJ, “George Sand,” The Galaxy 24 (July 1877): 59. “His views of American women writers had a tone ranging from condescension to outrage,” writes Alfred Habegger in Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9.
23. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 188.
24. “Literary Notes,” The Critic 1 (Jan. 29, 1881): 7.
25. Harper & Brothers to CFW, Feb. 22, 1882, in J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 484–85. Contract in “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” microfilm (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980), Butler Library, Columbia University, reel 2, vol. 4, p. 301.
26. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211. HJ had a similarly dispiriting effect on other writers as well. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to him of the “despair” he felt after reading his work. He felt “a lout and slouch of the first water” compared to HJ. Quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 125.
27. Atlantic’s circulation in Ellery Sedgwick, A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 127. Harper’s circulation in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1938), 6. Sales figures for Portrait in Michael Gorra, The Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 239. Sales figures for Anne in Rayburn Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), 159.
28. Literary World and Critic quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132, 126. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 186–88.
29. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190.
30. “Miss Woolson’s ‘Anne,’ ” The Century 24 (Aug. 1882): 636.
31. “Recent American Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly 50 (July 1882): 111–12. Review of Anne, Californian 6 (Sept. 1882): 287. Others quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement that ran nationally and was reprinted in the back of For the Major (Harper & Brothers, 1883).
32. New York Tribune quoted in Harper & Brothers advertisement. “The Native Element in American Fiction,” The Century 26 (July 1883): 364.
33. Quoted in Harper, The House of Harper, 484.
34. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 256.
35. CFW to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, June 30, [1882], CL, 203.
36. ECS to CFW, Nov. 12, 1882, CL, 567.
37. ECS to CFW, Nov. 12, [1882], CL, 567–68.
38. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 255–56.
39. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 207.
40. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 206–7. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 220.
41. Benedict III, 495. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 207.
42. CFW to Hamilton Wright Mabie, June 18, [1883], CL, 258. CFW to ECS, Apr. 30, [1883], CL, 240.
43. “Recent Fiction,” Overland Monthly 11 (Aug. 1883): 212. The Boston Globe quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement that ran nationally and in the back of most of her subsequent books. “New Publications,” New York Times, June 16, 1883, p. 3. Review of For the Major, The Independent 35 (Aug. 2, 1883): 11. Sales figures in Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 159.
44. CFW, For the Major, 159, 162.
45. Ibid., 188.
46. CFW, “At the Château of Corinne,” 270.
47. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 357.
48. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 185. Inscribed copy of The Portrait of a Lady at the University of Basel.
CHAPTER 9: The Expatriate’s Life
1. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 208.
2. CFW to ECS and Flora Mather, Sept. 18, [1882], CL, 215.
3. CFW to KM, Dec. 10, [1882], CL, 154. Sharon Dean dates this letter as 1880, but internal evidence suggests 1882.
4. JH, “Clarence King,” Address of John Hay (New York: The Century, 1906), 348. HJ quoted in Robert Wilson, The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007), 15.
5. King quoted in Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 2009), 124. Sandweiss extensively documents King’s secret marriage.
6. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 534. JH quoted in Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 114.
7. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.
8. CFW to KM, [Dec. 10, 1882], CL, 154, 155.
9. CFW to Clara Stone Hay, Jan. 8, [1883], CL, 220. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 249.
10. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.
11. HJ quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 115. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 249.
12. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 223, 224.
13. CFW to Elizabeth Gwinn Mather, Apr. 25, 1883, CL, 236. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 222.
14. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, [1883], CL, 223. CFW to SM, July 18, [1881], CL, 169.
15. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 246.
16. Ibid., 252.
17. Ibid., 252, 247.
18. Ibid., CL, 251. CFW to HJ, May 24, [1883], CL, 256–57. Without HJ’s half of the correspondence, his biographers have tended to assume that her deep affection for him was one-sided. However, CFW was much too sensitive to pursue a friendship that was unreciprocated. That he was capable of tremendous affection is evidenced by his letters to Grace Norton; see Leon Edel’s multivolume collection of letters as well as the letters in Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. Susan E. Gunter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). As Gunter explains in her introduction, “his letters to these women were warmly human” rather than “withdrawn,” as HJ has often been portrayed (11).
19. CFW to Winifred Howells, May 11, 1883, CL, 253.
20. Rebecca L. Tabber, Letters of a Family: Clarke Family Relations 1822 to 1889 (master’s thesis, SUNY-Oneonta, 1997), 26–28, copy at Research Library, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter, Sept. 5, [1883], CL, 265.
21. “Register of Deaths, September 1877 to January 1888,” book 1, Health Department, City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Records Office. The record was found by Sandra Woolson. I am grateful to Gary Woolson for providing me with the information.
22. CFW to SM, July 6, [1880], CL, 145. See deed dated May 26, 1882, and “Daily Real Estate Record” in Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to SM, Jan. 10, [1883], CL, 224.
23. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 269.
24. Ibid.
25. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 269, 270. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1883?], CL, 268.
26. CFW to Jane Averell Carter, [1883?], CL, 268. HJ to Grace Norton, Jan. 19, [1884], HJL3, 20. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270.
27. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Oct. 14, 1883, HJL3, 10. HJ to WDH, Feb. 21, 1884, HJL3, 28. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270. French Ensor Chadwick to JH, Jan. 20, 1884, Brown.
28. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 270.
29. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 274. Leon Edel, “Search for an Anchorage,” HJL3, 3.
30. HJ to Grace Norton, July 28, [1883], HJL2, 424.
31. CFW to SM, Jan. 20, [1884], CL, 272. JH to SM, May 10, 1884, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 275.
32. HJ to WDH, Feb. 21, 1884, HJL3, 29. HJ to Mrs. Humphry Ward, Dec. 9, [1884], HJL3, 59.
33. CFW to JH, [June 1884?], CL, 279. CFW to JH, [May 1884?], CL, 280. CFW to Mrs. Howells, July 15, [1884], CL, 283.
34. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, Mar. 29, 1884, CL, 277.
35. CFW to Mrs. Howells, July 15, [1884], CL, 283. HJ to Elizabeth Boott, [June 2], 1884, HJL3, 44.
36. HJ to Francis Parkman, Aug. 24, [1884], HJL3, 48. CFW to SM, Sept. 14, [1884], CL, 286.
37. CFW to KM, [Oct. 21, 1884], CL, 288.
38. Ibid., 289.
39. Account in CFW’s handwriting in the margins of her copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (Boston: Houghton, 1886), 262, Rollins.
40. “Miss Woolson’s Stories,” Harper’s Bazar 19 (Nov. 20, 1896): 758. “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” microfilm (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980), Butler Library, Columbia University, Aug. 1883 and Apr. 1885, reel 33, F1. CFW to JH, Apr. 29, [1885], CL, 297. Unfortunately, the agreement for the serial rights of East Angels has not survived. For her next novel, Jupiter Lights, she received $3,500, presumably the new price. See agreement in “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” Oct. 15, 1889, reel 2, vol. 5.
41. Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 244. Georgia Krieger, “East Angels: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Revision of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady,” Legacy 22 (2005): 18–29. Geraldine Murphy, “Northeast Angels: Henry James in Woolson’s Florida,” in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894, ed. Kathleen Diffley (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 232–48.
42. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” in Partial Portraits (1888); reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 170. Gorra discusses James’s exploration of “the drama of the interior life” in Portrait of a Novel, xvi. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Through One Administration (Boston: J. Loring, 1883), 55, 64.
43. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190. CFW, East Angels, 346.
44. CFW, East Angels, 498, 549, 551.
45. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 305. CFW to SM, Mar. 14, [1893], CL, 506. She describes here her process for writing each of her novels. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517.
46. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins. “On the Writing of Novels,” The Critic 221 (Mar. 24, 1888): 139.
47. CFW, East Angels, 551. CFW to Elinor Howells, [Summer 1883?], CL, 296. Although Sharon Dean dates this letter [1884?], it appears to belong with those she wrote during the summer after they had been together in Italy. CFW to JH, Jan. 27, [1884], CL, 275. CFW to JH, [June 1884?], CL, 280.
48. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304.
49. CFW to Emily Vernon Clark, n.d., CL, 550–51.
50. CFW to Mary Gale Carter, Oct. 14, [1885], CL, 299.
51. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Feb. 23, 1886], CL, 307. CFW to Katharine Loring, Oct. 9, [1886?], CL, 316. J. Burney Yeo, Climate and Health Resorts (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), 635.
52. Copy of The Bostonians inscribed “Constance Fenimore Woolson from Henry James. London Feb. 20th 1886,” University of Basel.
53. Alice and William James quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 238.
54. Strouse, Alice James, 259. Alice James quoted in Strouse, Alice James, 185, 259. CFW, undated fragments, BHS. The references to “your brother,” who is suffering from jaundice in Venice, indicates that the letter was written to Alice James in April 1887.
55. HJ quoted in Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), xiii. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 302. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Jan. 7, [1886], HJL3, 107.
56. CFW to Samuel L. Mather, [Feb. 23, 1886], CL, 307.
CHAPTER 10: Home Found
1. CFW to KM, Apr. 30, 1886, CL, 311, 312.
2. Ibid., 312.
3. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 314. HJ to J. R. Osgood, Apr. 18, [1885], HJL3, 77.
4. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 314. Linda Simon, “Diagnosing the Physician: Patients’ Evaluation of Nineteenth Century Medical Therapeutics,” in Revue Angliciste de l’Université de la Réunion, Alizes/Trade Winds (Automne 2003); http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/352.html.
5. CFW to KM, Apr. 30, 1886, CL, 312.
6. HJ to FB, May 25, [1886], HJL3, 119–20.
7. CFW always referred to “Miss Greenough” without reference to her first name. I have been able to identify her as Louisa from Nathalia Wright’s “Henry James and the Greenough Data,” American Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1958): 338–43. Her brother Henry had married Francis Boott’s sister, and Lizzie grew up with many Greenough cousins. See Carol M. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1992), 189. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 321. CFW to FB, Feb. 7, [1890], Duveneck Family. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 313.
8. CFW to Katharine Loring, Oct. 9, [1886?], CL, 316.
9. CFW to ECS, Feb. 24, [1887], CL, 332. I use CFW’s name for the villa, Brichieri, although it was also known as the Villa Brichieri-Colombi.
10. CFW to SM, Mar. 18, [1886], CL, 308. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 321–22.
11. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 322.
12. HJ called her “Fenimore” only in letters to Francis and Lizzie Boott. It is possible the name was a kind of joke between them because of Louisa Greenough’s fascination with her illustrious ancestry. HJ to Lizzie Boott, Oct. 18, [1886], HJL3, 136, 135. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138.
13. HJ to FB, Nov. 4, [1886], Houghton. MS Am 1094. HJ to FB, Aug. 15, [1886], HJL3, 130. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138.
14. CFW to FB, Jan. 9, [1891], and CFW to FB, Sept. 17, [1890], Duveneck Family.
15. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. CFW’s letters to FB, Duveneck Family.
16. The poem reads:
French constancy; a marsh; & “I” beyond
Nor “I” alone. Still “more,” yet not the whole
Only in part a name, which, to complete
Some think can only be a cooper’s rôle.
No, rather the embroiderer’s. So let
A skillful hand produce the tambour-frame,
Set the wools on, & end with them the name,
A name they’ll ne’er dishonor. Far from that!
They’ll add to it, increase its world-wide fame.
FB, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” taped into a copy of Benedict II in the Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Another version of the poem appears in Benedict II, 301.
17. Josephine W. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher (San Francisco: John Howell-Books, 1970), ch. 9.
18. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, ch. 10; quote from William James, 112.
19. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” 191–95.
20. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, ch. 10; quote from Lizzie Boott, 115. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” 195.
21. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family. HJ quoted in Mahonri Sharp Young, “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck,” American Art Journal 1 (Spring 1969), 94. CFW to SM, Nov. 14, [1886], CL, 324.
22. Young, “The Two Worlds,” 99. HJ to Henrietta Reubell, Mar. 11, [1886], HJL3, 117.
23. CFW to FB, Sept. 15, [1888], Duveneck Family. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, n.d., CL, 555.
24. HJ to FB, Nov. 26, [1886], HJL3, 138. Copy of The Princess Casamassima at University of Basel.
25. HJ to Mr. and Mrs. William James, Dec. 23, [1886], HJL3, 151. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 335. HJ to JH, Dec. 24, [1886], Brown. The letter is also printed in HJL3, where Edel has transcribed the phrase as “a prospect on our part” (153).
26. Rayburn Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), 159.
27. WDH, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 73 (Aug. 1886): 477–78.
28. CFW to JH, July 30, [1886], CL, 313.
29. Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 272. CFW to JH, Feb. 23, [1887], CL, 330.
30. “Our Monthly Gossip,” Lippincott’s 38 (Nov. 1886): 548–50. “Mr. Howells on ‘East Angels,’ ” Christian Union 34 (July 29, 1886): 7. “Our Monthly Gossip,” Lippincott’s 39 (Jan. 1887): 179. WDH, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 79 (June 1889): 153.
31. “A Romance of Florida,” New York Times, June 6, 1886, p. 5. “East Angels,” The Literary World 24 (July 1886): 243. “Recent Fiction,” The Independent 38 (Aug. 26, 1886): 10. “East Angels,” The Critic 6 (Sep. 4, 1886), 111. “Divorce,” Church Review 48 (Oct. 1886), 393. “Recent Novels,” The Nation 11 (Nov. 1886): 396. Horace Scudder, “Recent Novels by Women,” Atlantic Monthly 59 (Feb. 1887): 268.
32. CFW to SM, Mar. 31, [1887], CL, 339. CFW to ECS, Feb. 24, [1887], CL, 331, 332.
33. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 334. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (New York: James Miller, 1866), Seventh Book, 255–56. Barrett Browning visited the villa only once but was so taken with the view that she had her heroine Aurora live there.
34. CFW to SM, Mar. 24, [1887], CL, 338.
35. CFW to SM, Mar. 31, [1887], CL, 340. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1887], CL, 350.
36. CFW to Mary Gayle Carter Clarke, Feb. 25, [1887], CL, 334.
37. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 343. CFW to SM, Jan. 12, [1888], CL, 352.
CHAPTER 11: Confrère
1. CFW to JH, Apr. 24, [1883], CL, 223. CFW to HJ, May 7, [1883], CL, 248. The sentence in each is nearly identical.
2. CFW to JH, Apr. 24, [1883], CL, 233.
3. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 302–3.
4. CFW to SM, Mar. 18, [1886], CL, 309. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 345. The bust now resides at Rollins, where it sits on the mantel in the English faculty lounge and, sadly, has grown discolored with dirt.
5. “Miss Woolson. Something About the Famous Novelist and Former Clevelander,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 13, 1887, p. 5.
6. The essay was titled “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson” when it was first published in Harper’s Weekly but was shortened to “Miss Woolson” when it appeared in Partial Portraits. For the sake of consistency, I will use the shorter title, by which it is usually referred.
7. HJ, “William Dean Howells,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (June 19, 1886): 394–95. HJ, “Edwin A. Abbey,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (Dec. 4, 1886): 786–87.
8. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40.
9. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Weekly 31 (Feb. 12, 1887): 114, 115.
10. Rob Davidson, The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 145.
11. HJ, “The Death of the Lion” (1893), in Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon (New York: Penguin, 2001), 265. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” 114.
12. Davidson, The Master and the Dean, 147. HJ, “Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson,” 114.
13. HJ to FB, Mar. 15, [1887], HJL3, 176. He does not mention the nature of CFW’s presumed offense, but in the fragment cited below she wrote to Alice about him needing to stay in bed and apparently resisting the advice. Alice James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 3, [1887], in The Death & Letters of Alice James, Selected Correspondence, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Boston: Exact Change, 1997), 130. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. An undated fragment of a letter from CFW to Alice James mentions HJ’s jaundice and provides a report from Mrs. Wagniere, just returned from Venice to Florence, on his health. The fragment is in BHS.
14. HJ paid no rent this time. See HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. HJ to Emma (Wilkinson) Pertz, [Apr.–May 1887], HJL3, 179. HJ had heard a story in Florence after his previous stay on Bellosguardo that gave him the idea for “The Aspern Papers.” He borrowed the name “Tita” for one of the characters from CFW’s Anne. See Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 212. Gordon also explains that “[i]t has been assumed that the narrator speaks for James when he resists a proposal” from the younger of the two women, “but this has served to prop a biographic premise for which there is no evidence, that Fenimore hunted a husband” (218–19).
15. HJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16. CFW to SM, Apr. 23, [1887], CL, 341. HJ to Edmund Gosse, Apr. 24, [1887], in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915: A Literary Friendship, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 46. HJ to Katherine Bronson, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 216.
16. HJ to William James, May 3, [1887], HJL3, 182–83.
17. CFW to SM, May 15, [1887], CL, 342. CFW to SM, June 7, [1887], CL, 344.
18. “Pen Picture of Mrs. Burnett,” The Richfield Springs (N.Y.) Mercury, Mar. 27, 1890.
19. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. The lack of evidence has led James’s biographers to treat the fact of his living under the same roof with CFW in various ways. Edel, in Henry James: The Middle Years, downplayed its significance for James, stressing that his contentment and productivity had to do with his surroundings: “He had discovered, for a time, an Italian paradise” (214). The two probably took “certain of their meals together” but “lived very much as they would have lived had they been housed apart” (217). He speculated that “this pleasant and méticuleuse old maid may have nourished fantasies of a closer tie,” although HJ was oblivious to her desires (217). Fred Kaplan, in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1992), saw the arrangement in a different light: “Undoubtedly, he saw Fenimore every day. It was as much of a love affair with a woman as he was ever to have, a daily intimacy that protected daily privacy, that made no physical demands beyond courtesy, no emotional demands beyond friendship” (318). HJ to Grace Norton, Oct. 17, 1882, quoted in Tara Knapp, “Epistolary Fluidity: Privacy and the ‘False Code’ of Letter Showing,” in Tracing Henry James, eds. Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 447, 448.
20. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. CWB also discussed her agreement with CFW in a letter to May Harris, Benedict II, 387. CWB to KM, n.d., Benedict III, 607. CFW to HJ, Aug. 30, [1882], CL, 211.
21. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill.
22. On the subject of their love for each other, see Kaplan in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, where he writes that CFW was “a woman [HJ] could love without loving her as a woman” (313); and Paul Fisher in House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York: Macmillan, 2009), who describes HJ’s “love” for CFW as another instance of the “love that dare not speak its name,” comparing it to his unauthorized love for Paul Zhukovsky (521). CFW called HJ “Harry” in a letter to SM, Jan. 2, [1888], CL, 355. She also always called him “Harry” in her letters to Francis Boott; the first that survives is dated Aug. 7, 1888, Duveneck Family.
23. Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (1924), ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 48. Wharton quoted in Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 213.
24. Poems from Shelley, ed. Stopford A. Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1880), Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, Clare Benedict Library. In the published letters, I was able to find only one contemporary instance of HJ using the word confrère, in reference to himself, in a letter to Alphonse Daudet in 1884, HJL3, 46. HJ appears to have used it more liberally later in life. In CRB’s letters to Leon Edel at McGill, she always refers to HJ as “Cousin Henry.”
25. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” Partial Portraits (1888), reprinted in The American Essays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 162–63. Gordon, in A Private Life, also thinks CFW could have requested that HJ cut out the biographical material (213).
26. HJ, “Miss Woolson,” 171.
27. CFW, Notebooks, Benedict II, 102–3. In 1887, she was reading Augustine Birrell and James Russell Lowell, who is also mentioned nearby. The story idea about Mrs. B. appears to have been written afterward. See CFW, Notebooks, Benedict II, 107–8.
28. Gordon, in A Private Life, 286, describes how in “The Beast in the Jungle” HJ used CFW’s story idea, outlined in her notebooks, about a man to whom nothing ever happens.
CHAPTER 12: Arcadia Lost
1. CFW to ECS, Feb. 24, [1887], CL, 333. CFW to Linda Guilford, Mar. 1, 1887, CL, 336. CFW to SM, Jan. 22, [1888], CL, 354.
2. CFW’s copy of Augustine Birrell’s Obiter Dicta, 2nd ser., at Rollins; marginalia on p. 229. CFW’s copy of Poems from Shelley at Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome. CFW’s copy of Margaret Woods’s A Village Tragedy at Claremont Historical Society, Claremont, NH. CFW to SM, Jan. 22, [1888], CL, 355. CFW to JH, Aug. 6, [1887], CL, 347. CFW to JH, Dec. 20, [1890], CL, 434.
3. HJ to Alice H. James, Apr. 24, 1887, Houghton, Ms Am 1237.16.
4. Elizabeth Boott Duveneck to FB, July 7, [1887], Frank Duveneck and Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Papers, 1851–1972, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. CFW to FB, Sept. 11, [1890], Duveneck Family.
5. CFW to JH, Aug. 6, [1887], CL, 348. “Pen Picture of Mrs. Burnett,” The Richfield Springs (NY) Mercury, Mar. 27, 1890. CFW to SM, Jan. 22, [1888], CL, 355.
6. HJ to Elizabeth Boott, Jan. 29, [1888], Houghton, MS Am 1094.580. The letter is incorrectly marked as [1887?].
7. Josephine W. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher (San Francisco: John Howell-Books, 1970), 120. Carol M. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 1992), 198. Osborne convincingly refutes Jean Strouse’s speculation in Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) that Lizzie may have committed suicide, see p. 199 n. 15.
8. HJ to Henrietta Reubell, Apr. 1, 1888, HJL3, 230–31. HJ to FB, May 15, [1888], HJL3, 233. HJ quoted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 325. Leon Edel speculates that CFW gave HJ the description. See Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 248.
9. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to FB, Sept. 15, [1888], Duveneck Family.
10. HJ to FB, Apr. 3, [1888], HJL3, 232.
11. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, 123–24. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family.
12. CFW to FB, Aug. 7, [1888], Duveneck Family.
13. CFW to FB, Aug. 7, [1888]; CFW to FB, Mar. 14, [1893], Duveneck Family.
14. CFW to FB, Aug. 7, [1888]; CFW to FB, Sept. 15, [1888]; CFW to FB, Dec. 13, [1888], Duveneck Family.
15. CFW to FB, Sept. 15, [1888], Duveneck Family.
16. HJ to WWB, July 3, [1888], Pierpont Morgan. CFW to SM, Aug. 22, [1888], CL, 358.
17. HJ to FB, Oct. 29, [1888], HJL3, 247. HJ to FB, May 15, [1888], HJL3, 233. CFW’s copy of The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning at University of Basel.
18. HJ to FB, Oct. 29, [1888], HJL3, 247, 246. CFW to FB, Dec. 13, [1888]; CFW to FB, Nov. 27, [1889], Duveneck Family.
19. HJ quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 250. Alice James quoted in Strouse, Alice James, 259.
20. CWB to May Harris, n.d., Benedict III, 589.
21. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Dec. 4, [1888], Cornell. The undated letters at Cornell mention many gifts. Quote about Fiske in Horatio S. White, “A Sketch of the Life and Labors of Professor Willard Fiske,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 12 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1919), 84.
22. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Dec. 4, [1888], Cornell.
23. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family. CFW, “A Pink Villa,” Harper’s 77 (Nov. 1888): 856.
24. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 367. Caroline Gebhard, “Romantic Love and Wife-Battering in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Jupiter Lights,” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays, ed. Victoria Brehm (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 83–96.
25. CFW, Jupiter Lights (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889), 17.
26. Ibid., 11, 292. CFW to SM, Jan. 16, [1884], CL, 269. HJ quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 208.
27. CFW, Jupiter Lights, 142, 234, 163.
28. Ibid., 179, 257.
29. CFW to FB, Feb. 7, [1890], Duveneck Family.
30. CFW, Jupiter Lights, 340, 347.
31. Ibid., 79.
32. Ibid., 90.
33. Caroline Halstead Royce, “Remembered Books,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1899, p. BR60.
34. CWB to KM, Jan. 27, 1889, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. “In reality, Clara gave [the party],” CFW wrote to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 365. CFW to WWB, [1889], CL, 363. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Aug. 23, 1889, CL, 381.
35. HJ to FB, Jan. 18, 1889, HJL3, 249. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 366. Edward N. Akin, Flagler: Rockefeller Partner and Florida Baron (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1988), 116.
36. CFW to SM, Jan. 12, [1888], CL, 352. CFW to Mary Mapes Dodge, Sept. 13, [1888?], CL, 360. CFW to FB, Aug. 23, [1889]; CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family.
37. CFW to FB, Mar. 13, [1889], Duveneck Family. CFW to KM, 1889, CL, 370. CFW to FB, Nov. 27, [1889], Duveneck Family. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, May 13, [1889], CL, 369. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Friday, n.d., Cornell.
38. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Friday, n.d., Cornell. (This is a different letter than the one quoted above.) CFW to ECS, Aug. 10, [1889], CL, 377. CFW to SM, July 6, [1889], CL, 373. CFW to WWB, July 13, [1889], CL, 374. CFW to SM, Aug. 13, [1889], CL, 378.
39. CFW to SM, Oct. 16, [1889], CL, 383. CFW to SM, Nov. 4, 1890, CL, 427.
40. CFW to FB, Nov. 27, [1889], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Aug. 13, [1889], CL, 378.
41. CFW’s copy of The Teaching of Epictetus (London: Walter Scott, 1888) is at Rollins. Pages torn out are 55–58, 66–68, and 71–72. Marked passages are on pp. 135 and 200. Someone later tried to erase her markings on p. 200.
42. CRB to Stella Gray, June 22, [1956], in possession of recipient. CFW, Jupiter Lights, 307.
43. CFW to SM, Aug. 13, [1889], CL, 378.
44. CFW to FB, Aug. 23, [1889], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Aug. 13, 1889, CL, 379. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Aug. 23, 1889, CL, 380.
45. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Oct. 16, [1889], Cornell. CFW to SM, Oct. 16, [1889], CL, 383. CFW to FB, Nov. 27, [1889], Duveneck Family.
46. CFW to SM, Feb. 25, 1890, CL, 403. “Recent Fiction,” The Independent 43 (Nov. 28, 1889): 16. Review of Jupiter Lights, The Book Buyer 6 (Dec. 1, 1889): 453. “Harpers for September,” New York Herald, Aug. 23, 1899, p. 2. The Spectator quoted in a Harper & Brothers advertisement, New York Herald, Oct. 30, 1899, p. 7. “Novels of the Week,” The Athenaeum, no. 3247 (Jan. 18, 1890): 81.
47. Horace Scudder, “Recent American Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly 65 (Jan. 1890): 127, 128. “Talk About New Books,” Catholic World 50 (Mar. 1890): 826, 827.
48. CFW to SM, Apr. 17, [1890], CL, 409. “Recent Fiction,” The Nation (Mar. 13, 1890): 225.
49. CFW to SM, Feb. 25, 1890, CL, 403. Sales figures in Rayburn Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), 159. CFW to SM, Dec. 8, [1889], CL, 388.
1. CFW, “Corfu and the Ionian Sea,” in Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 284.
2. CFW to SM, Jan. 5, 1890, CL, 392. CFW, “Corfu,” 286, 290.
3. CFW to SM, Jan. 5, 1890, CL, 390, 391.
4. CFW to SM, Jan. 5, 1890, CL, 391. CWB to Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Gwinn Mather, Jan. 30, 1890, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW, “Corfu,” 355.
5. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Jan. 17, 1890, CL, 396.
6. CWB to Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Gwinn Mather, Jan. 30, 1890, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, Jan. 17, 1890, CL, 396, 397.
7. CFW to Daniel Willard Fiske, Feb. 19, [1890], Cornell.
8. CWB to Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Gwinn Mather, Jan. 30, 1890, in typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to SM, Feb. 25, 1890, CL, 404. CFW to SM, Jan. 31, 1890, CL, 399.
9. CWB to Samuel L. Mather, Mar. 4, 1890, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CFW to SM, Feb. 25, 1890, CL, 403. CWB to Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Gwinn Mather, Jan. 30, 1890, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
10. CFW to SM, Apr. 17, 1890, CL, 406–7. CWB to Samuel L. Mather, Mar. 4, 1890, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
11. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, n.d., CL, 553. Eugene Schuyler, Selected Essays with a Memoir by Evelyn Schuyler Schaeffer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 198. CFW to JH, Dec. 20, 1890, CL, 436.
12. CFW to SM, Apr. 17, [1890], CL, 408–9. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, [1890], CL, 438.
13. CFW to SM, Apr. 17, [1890], CL, 408.
14. CFW to KM, June 12, 1890, CL, 415. CFW, “Cairo in 1890,” in Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu, 158, 160.
15. CFW, “Cairo in 1890,” 156, 236–38. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, May 20, [1890], CL, 413–14.
16. CFW, “Cairo in 1890,” 177.
17. Ibid., 232, 224, 225.
18. Ibid., 193, 220. CFW’s prediction was incorrect; Al-Azhar University in Cairo remains today a center of Islamic learning.
19. Ibid., 276–77. CFW to WWB, Dec. 17, [1893], CL, 542. Praying Arab figurine at Rollins.
20. CFW, “Cairo in 1890,” 208, 211.
21. Ibid., 278, 279. CFW to JH, Dec. 20, [1890], CL, 435.
22. CFW to WWB, Aug. 17, [1890], CL, 418. HJ to FB, Apr. 23, 1890, Houghton, MS Am 1094.609.
23. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, May 11, [1890], CL, 411. CFW’s copy of God in His World in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS; quoted passage and marginalia on p. 33. Lines in both margins also mark the passage.
24. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, May 11, [1890], CL, 412–13.
25. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421. CFW to KM, [June 12, 1890], CL, 415.
26. CFW to FB, Sept. 11 and Sept. 17, [1890], Duveneck Family. HJ speaks of his upcoming “pious pilgrimage” to Bellosguardo in HJ to FB, Apr. 23, 1890, Houghton, MS Am 1094.609. He stayed with Baldwin in Florence in July. HJ to WWB, Sept. 29, [1890], Pierpont Morgan. CFW told WWB that HJ spent “two days” with her; Oct. 5, [1890], CL, 423. He most likely stayed at the Queen’s Hotel up the street or in the apartment below her; both are mentioned in letters to other visitors.
27. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421. CFW to WWB, Oct. 5, [1890], CL, 423. CFW to FB, Nov. 23, [1890], Duveneck Family.
28. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 422. William James’s report in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 6 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1890), 660. CFW to JH, Dec. 20, [1890], CL, 437. CFW to FB, Jan. 9, [1890], Duveneck Family.
29. CFW to FB, Sept. 17, [1890], Duveneck Family. CFW to FB, Nov. 23, [1890], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Nov. 4, 1890, CL, 428.
30. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1890], CL, 425. CFW to SM, Oct. 9, [1890], CL, 424.
31. HJ to FB, Dec. 19, 1890, Houghton, MS Am 1094.611. CFW to SM, Dec. 15, [1890], CL, 431. England has eight hours of daily sunlight during December; CFW must be exaggerating for effect or referring to the grayness of the days.
32. CFW to FB, Jan. 9, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 439.
33. CFW to FB, May 2, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW, “Dorothy,” Harper’s 84 (Mar. 1892): 562.
34. Ibid., 563.
35. Ibid., 566, 570.
36. Ibid., 574, 575.
37. CFW to FB, Feb. 28, [1892], Duveneck Family.
38. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 442, 441.
39. HJ to Alice James and Katharine Loring, [Jan. 4, 1891], HJL3, 320.
40. CFW to FB, Feb. 28, [1891], Duveneck Family.
41. CFW to FB, May 2, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW to FB, Feb. 28, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW to WWB, Jan. 25, [1891], CL, 444.
42. HJ to FB, Mar. 24, [1891], Houghton, MS Am 1094.612. CFW to FB, Feb. 28, [1891], Duveneck Family.
43. HJ quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 287. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 442.
44. CFW to FB, Nov. 23, [1890], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Nov. 4, 1890, CL, 427.
45. CFW to FB, Feb. 28, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW to SM, Feb. 23, [1891], CL, 447.
46. CFW to FB, May 2, [1891], Duveneck Family. See also KM to SM, May 29, 1891, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. CRB to Leon Edel, Jan. 29, 1948, McGill. This comment was in response to Edel’s question about whether CFW stayed in England to be near HJ. His nearness, she insisted, was but one benefit of living in England.
1. Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 305; quote from HJ on p. 306.
2. HJ to WWB, [July 25, 1891], Pierpont Morgan. HJ to FB, July 29, [1891], Houghton, MS Am 1094.615.
3. James D. Symon, “Oriel Bill,” English Illustrated Magazine 11 (Feb. 1894): 455–56.
4. CFW to FB, Nov. 21, [1891], Duveneck Family.
5. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, [1891], CL, 462. CFW to SM, Oct. 16, [1891], CL, 459.
6. CFW to Flora Stone Mather, [1891], CL, 461–62.
7. CFW to SM, Oct. 16, [1891], CL, 459. CFW to FB, Nov. 21, [1891], Duveneck Family. CFW to KM, Oct. 20, 1891, CL, 460. Premiere described in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 297–99; and Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 344–45. HJ to WWB, Oct. 19, 1891, in Philip Horne, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking, 1999), 242.
8. CFW to FB, Nov. 21, [1891], Duveneck Family.
9. CFW to Linda Thayer Guilford, [1891], CL, 465. CFW to FB, Nov. 21, [1891], Duveneck Family.
10. CFW to FB, Nov. 21, [1891], Duveneck Family.
11. CFW to SM, Jan. 9, [1893], CL, 499–500. On the English Library series, see Clement Vollmer, The American Novel in Germany, 1871–1913 (Philadelphia: International Printing, 1918), 26–27.
12. HJ to WWB, Dec. 29, 1891, Pierpont Morgan.
13. CFW to WWB, Feb. 5, [1892], CL, 467. CFW to FB, Feb. 21, [1892], Duveneck Family. “Statistics of the Influenza Epidemic,” The British Medical Journal 1 (Jan. 23, 1892): 190.
14. CFW to WWB, Feb. 5 and Feb. 6, [1892], CL, 467, 469. CFW to SM, Feb, 8, [1892], CL, 470.
15. CFW to WWB, Feb. 6, [1892], CL, 468, 469. CFW to SM, Feb, 8, [1892], CL, 470.
16. CFW to SM, May 20, [1892], CL, 476.
17. CRB to Leon Edel, Jan. 29, 1948, McGill. CFW to SM, Nov. 24, [1892], CL, 492. CFW to SM, [Jan. 1893], CL, 496.
18. CFW to FB, Feb. 21, [1892], Duveneck Family.
19. CFW to FB, Feb. 21, [1892], Duveneck Family. CFW to WWB, Feb. 6, [1892], CL, 469. Only a small fragment of a letter survives, in BHS, written by CFW and addressed, I believe, to Alice James. It was written when HJ had jaundice in Venice in 1887.
20. Strouse, Alice James, 312.
21. CFW to SM, May 20, [1892], CL, 476. HJ to FB, Mar. 9, [1892], HJL3, 382.
22. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512. Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 249. Edel also acknowledges the possibility that the message was about their relationship but doesn’t examine it further. See The Middle Years, 318.
23. HJ to FB, Mar. 9, [1892], HJL3, 381.
24. Benedict III, 605. CFW to SM, July 15, [1892], CL, 482.
25. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, [1892], CL, 466. CFW to SM, Feb. 15, [1892], CL, 473. “Archives of Harper and Brothers, 1817–1914,” microfilm (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980), Butler Library, Columbia University, reel 34 F2. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, June 30, [1892], CL, 480.
26. CFW to FB, Feb. 21, [1892], Duveneck Family.
27. CFW to SM, Oct. 14, [1892], CL, 488. There are no surviving letters from CFW to FB from between April 1892 and January 1893.
28. HJ, “The Lesson of the Master,” in Selected Tales (New York: Penguin, 2001), 145. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 364.
29. This is the only story CFW published in Harper’s Bazar, and there is no conceivable reason why Alden would not have wanted the story for Harper’s. She had published in Harper’s only twice since Jupiter Lights finished its run in September 1889.
30. CFW, “In Sloane Street,” Harper’s Bazar 25 (June 11, 1892): 474.
31. Ibid., 474.
32. Gordon, in A Private Life, believes Gertrude is a secret writer (251). Marie Bashkirtseff, The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1890), 103–4. CFW, “In Sloane Street,” 475.
33. CFW, “In Sloane Street,” 475, 477.
34. Ibid., 475.
35. Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 204. Kaplan, The Imagination of Genius, 313. Gordon, A Private Life, 198. HJ quoted in CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill.
36. HJ, “The Middle Years,” in Tales of Henry James (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 211.
37. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512.
38. CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 493. CFW to SM, May 20, [1892], CL, 477. CFW to SM, Nov. 4, 1890, CL, 428. CFW to SM, Jan. 9, [1893], CL, 498.
39. CFW to SM, Mar. 14, [1893], CL, 506. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family.
40. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, June 30, [1892], CL, 481, 480.
41. CFW to SM, Jan. 9, [1892], CL, 498, 499.
42. CFW, Horace Chase (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 283.
43. See CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 493. The chant appears on pp. 4–5 of Horace Chase.
44. CFW, Horace Chase, 255, 340–41, 419. CFW to Henry Mills Alden, June 30, [1892?], CL, 481.
45. CFW, Horace Chase, 212, 9, 30–31.
46. Ibid., 160, 175.
47. Ibid., 80–81, 18.
48. CFW, “Mottoes, Maxims, Reflections,” Rollins.
49. CFW to SM, Jan. 9, [1893], CL, 500. CFW to FB, Jan. 9, [1893], Duveneck Family.
50. CFW to SM, Mar. 14, [1893], CL, 505. CFW to FB, Mar. 14, [1893], Duveneck Family.
51. CFW to unknown recipient, 1893, CL, 510. CFW to KM, June 12, 1890, CL, 415.
52. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512. CFW to FB, Mar. 14, [1893], Duveneck Family.
53. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512.
54. CFW to Rebekah Owen, May 9, [1893], CL, 513.
55. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 513. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517.
56. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 515.
CHAPTER 15: The Riddle of Existence
1. CFW to Winifred Howells, May 11, 1883, CL, 253. CFW to HJ, May 7, 1883, CL, 246. CFW to Flora Mather, July 1, 1893, CL, 516. The Casa Biondetti is near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.
2. CFW, “Lagoons,” Benedict II, 393–99. Ellipses in original.
3. CFW to Flora Mather, July 1, 1893, CL, 516.
4. CFW to FB, Sept. 9, [1893], Duveneck Family.
5. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517–18.
6. HJ, “The Grand Canal,” [Nov. 1892], in Italian Hours (New York: Penguin, 1992), 33. CFW to WWB, July 20, [1893], CL, 518. HJ to William James, Mar. 24, [1894], HJL3, 470.
7. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514. Linda Simon, “Diagnosing the Physician: Patients’ Evaluation of Nineteenth Century Medical Therapeutics,” in Revue Angliciste de l’Université de la Réunion, Alizes/Trade Winds (Automne 2003), http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/352.html. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” (1901), in From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization, ed. Greg Eghigian (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 207–23.
8. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514.
9. Simon, in “Diagnosing the Physician,” writes, “Baldwin, unlike other physicians, affirmed his patients’ experience that depression and fatigue often resulted from organic illness, and that pain, whatever its cause, was real.” CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. Daniel Tuke, A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1892), 688. Some medical scientists continue to look for a link between influenza and depression; see Olaoluwa Okusaga et al., “Association of Seropositivity for Influenza and Coronaviruses with History of Mood Disorders and Suicide Attempts,” Journal of Affective Disorders 130 (2011): 220–25. F. B. Smith, “The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894,” Social History of Medicine 8, no. 1 (1995): 71. HJ to Ariana Curtis, [June 21, 1894], Dartmouth.
10. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1893], CL, 526. CFW to unknown recipient, Oct. 14, [1893], CL, 524.
11. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 521. Ruskin quoted in Stephen Kite, Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 115. Ruskin’s drawings and notes of the Palazzo Orio, as it was then called, are on p. 112.
12. CFW to FB, Sept. 9, [1893], Duveneck Family.
13. The painting by Ricciardo Meacci today hangs in Lamb House, Rye, England, the final home of HJ. He had originally given CFW the painting and CWB gave it back to him after her death. Although CWB later asked for it back, the painting was returned to Lamb House, presumably after CWB’s death. The painting as well as notes pasted on the back, one in CFW’s hand, are viewable at http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/204158.
14. HJ to Ariana Curtis, July 14, [1893], HJL3, 420. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 544. HJ to Ariana Curtis, Sept. 19, [1893], quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 348.
15. CFW to CRB, Dec. 3, [1893], CL, 533. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1893], CL, 527.
16. Julian Norwich, Paradise of Cities: Venice in the 19th Century (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 247–48. HJ quoted in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Introduction, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James (London: Pushkin Press, 1998), 25. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 543.
17. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 528–29.
18. Ibid., 529.
19. CFW, “A Transplanted Boy,” in Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 120, 121.
20. Unpublished Curtis diary for 1893, private collection. HJ to FB, Oct. 21, 1893, HJL3, 37.
21. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 529. CFW to Zina Hulton, Nov. 15, [1893], Hulton Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
22. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], CL, 539. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 528.
23. HJ to WWB, Nov. 10, 1893, Pierpont Morgan.
24. CFW to SM, Nov. 23, [1893], CL, 530. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 534.
25. CFW to SM, Dec. 20, [1893], CL, 543.
26. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], 537–38.
27. Ibid., 536, 538.
28. CFW to WWB, Dec. 17, [1893], CL, 541. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], 537.
29. CFW to WWB, Dec. 17, [1893], CL, 541. CFW, Notebook, Rollins.
30. CFW, “Reflections,” Rollins. This is written on a scrap of paper, presumably from a different notebook than that in which she kept her notes on the lagoons. The passage is also printed in Benedict II, 411, with some slight modification. It does not end with a period, and, in fact, it may have continued on another page that has not survived.
31. CFW to KM, Dec. 25, [1893], CL, 540. CFW to ACW, Dec. 25, [1893], CL, 545; ellipses in original.
32. HJ to Katherine Bronson, Dec. 31, 1893, quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 356. HJ to Daniel Curtis, Dec. 27, 1893, Dartmouth.
33. Henry Mills Alden, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Weekly 38 (Feb. 3, 1894): 113.
34. CFW to KM, Dec. 25, [1894], CL, 440. Lady Layard’s Journal, The Brownings: A Research Guide, http://www.browningguide.org/browningscircle.php. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 544. Lady Layard’s Journal makes many mentions of Zina Hulton, the Bronsons, and the princess, whom she calls Olga, during these first weeks of the new year. Olga would later report to Lady Layard what she learned of CFW’s death.
35. Dr. Cini is identified as “head physician of the hospital” in an article about Woolson’s death, “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894. Lyndall Gordon, in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), spells his name Chene, as it would be pronounced, which is how Grace Carter, who did not know him, spelled it. Lady Layard, who knew him well, spelled it Cini. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 571. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. This letter is incorrectly dated as [2-4-1894]. The correct date appears at the end of the letter, after the signature. CFW to Harper & Brothers, Jan. 17, 1894, CL, 546.
36. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 572.
37. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 572. CFW’s words reported by Holas. CFW’s vomiting has been interpreted by Gordon, in A Private Life, as evidence that she was trying to poison herself “under the cover of supposed flu,” 273–74. However, the presence of fever indicates illness, and the fact that CFW left no will shows a lack of premeditation to kill herself. Lady Layard recorded in her journal on Jan. 19, [1984], “There is a great deal of influenza about.” Associations of green bile with ill temper, etc., in the entry for bile, in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989). Possible causes of CFW’s symptoms identified in Joan Weimer, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak (New York: Random House, 1994), 264, and independently confirmed in discussion with Dr. Eva Lizer.
38. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], CL, 537.
39. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573.
40. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573.
41. HJ to WWB, Jan. 26 [1894], HJL3, 457.
42. My reading of CFW’s final days differs from that of Gordon, in A Private Life, who sees CFW as calmly preparing for and planning her suicide over many days (274–76). Lady Layard’s Journal, Jan. 28, [1984]. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
43. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Lady Layard’s Journal, Mar. 7, [1894].
44. Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: Thomas Dunne, St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 49. Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 57–59. Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 308.
45. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, translated by Edoarda Grego.
46. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 232. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. CFW’s bell is at Rollins.
47. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. According to Lady Layard’s Journal, Jan. 28 [1894], CFW requested a cup that was holding flowers and would thus require washing. No one knows for sure what happened after the nurse left the room. There are conflicting accounts of the window she may have jumped or fallen from. Gordon, in A Private Life, correctly identifies the room as “overlooking the calle” but indicates that the sill of CFW’s bedroom window was too high for her to have fallen out of it accidentally (276). However, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has taken for me pictures of the windows in what must have been Woolson’s bedroom, as it is the only room facing the calle that was then in existence. (An addition was made in the twentieth century.) These pictures show that the sills were about two feet above the floor, indicating that CFW easily could have fallen out of one of the windows. In fact, today there are bars over the bottom portion of the windows to prevent anyone from falling or jumping out of them again. In any event, because no one was in the room with CFW and no description of the windows as they were then has survived, we cannot definitively know if she fell or jumped deliberately.
CHAPTER 16: Aftershocks
1. “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, and “Suicide,” La Gazzetta di Venezia, Jan. 25, 1894, both translated by Edoarda Grego. “Miss Woolson’s Fate,” The Buffalo (NY) Express, Feb. 16, 1894, a translation by Kate Field of a Jan. 25 story in the paper La Venezia. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
2. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
3. JH to SM, Jan. 31, 1894; Clara Hay to Flora Stone Mather, Jan. 31, 1894; JH to SM, Mar. 2, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
4. For initial U.S. reports, see, as a sampling: “A Favorite Writer Dead,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 3; “Death of Constance F. Woolson,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 2; “Mrs. [sic] Woolson, the Novelist, Dead,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 26, 1894, p. 1. In Venice, the following stories ran: “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, and “Suicide,” La Gazzetta di Venezia, Jan. 25, 1894; quote from the latter, translated by Edoarda Grego. “Suicide of a Lady Novelist,” The Standard (London), Jan. 27, 1894, p. 5. For reprints of this report in the United States, see, as a sampling: “Says Miss Woolson Was a Suicide,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 8; “Miss Woolson Committed Suicide,” The Sun (Baltimore), Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1; “Suicide of an American Authoress,” Omaha Daily Bee, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1; and “Jumped from a Window,” Idaho Daily Statesman, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1.
5. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Telegram, presumably from Grace (not signed), presumably to SM (addressed to Mather Hotel, Windsor, NY), microform, Constance Fenimore Woolson Papers, WRHS. Only a few papers ran the story; see, for instance: “MISS WOOLSON NOT A SUICIDE: She Fell from Her Window While Wandering About in Delirium,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1894, p. 3; The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3; “Not a Case of Suicide,” (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, Jan. 29, 1894, p. 10; “Prominent Personals,” Vermont Phoenix, Feb. 9, 1894, p. 3. R. J. Nevin to Anna Grace Carter, Feb. 7, 1894, Henry James Papers, University of Virginia.
6. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. Lady Layard’s Journal, Mar. 7 and Apr. 3, [1894].
7. Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 93.
8. “Death is not terrible to me,” CFW wrote to HJ, Feb. 23, [1882], CL, 191. “To me it is only a release; & if, at any time, you should hear that I had died, always be sure that I was quite willing, & even glad, to go.” Jamison explains in Night Falls Fast that many suicides are neither simply “long-considered” or sudden but “both: a brash moment of action taken during a span of settled and suicidal hopelessness” (198).
9. HJ to Anna Grace Carter, Jan. 26, [1894], Henry James Papers, UVA, 6251 (Box 2:73). HJ to WWB, Jan. 26, [1894], HJL3, 457.
10. Some of HJ’s letters in which he discusses CFW’s death can be found in HJL3, 457–71. Lyndall Gordon discusses the letters HJ wrote in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 279–80. Clipping from the New York Herald in Mather family scrapbook. Much else in this article, which suggests that HJ remained unmarried because his heart was buried in CFW’s grave, is erroneous. But it is interesting that the family kept the clipping. It was one of the few verifications in print of their close tie. I have been unable to locate the original.
11. HJ to WWB, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 464.
12. Quoted in Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 213.
13. HJ to FB, Jan. 31, [1894], HJL3, 463. HJ to JH, Jan. 28, 1894, John Hay Collection, Brown. HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 465–66. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 52.
14. HJ to FB, Jan. 31, [1894], HJL3, 463; HJ to WWB, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 464; HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 465. HJ to William James, Mar, 24, [1894], HJL3, 470.
15. HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, HJL3, 467.
16. Leon Edel posed the question in The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962): “Had her act been a partial consequence of frustration—of frustrated love for Henry?” (363). More recently, Gordon, in A Private Life, has imagined James asking, “What if Fenimore had killed herself because of him?” (289). But there is no evidence that she killed herself because of unrequited love for HJ or separation from HJ.
17. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. Edel, The Middle Years, 367–68.
18. Benedict III, 4–5; ellipses in original.
19. CWB to SM, May 2, [1894], Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Zina Hulton, “Fifty Years in Venice,” typescript, p. 130, Hulton Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Scraps and notes from CFW published in Benedict II. Anecdote by Mercede Huntington, “Recollections of Henry James in His Later Years,” a transcription of interviews done by the BBC in 1956, Houghton, MS Eng 1213.4(20).
21. HJ to WWB, [May 27, 1894], Pierpont Morgan. HJ to CRB, Sept. 13, [1907], HJL4, 460.
22. Benedict III, 4. CFW to WWB, July 20, [1893], CL, 518. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 98.
23. Benedict II, 144–45.
24. HJ, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in Selected Tales (New York: Penguin, 2001), 432.
25. Ibid., 436, 437.
26. Ibid., 443, 445.
27. Ibid., 446, 449.
28. Ibid., 454, 456.
29. Ibid., 459–60, 461.
30. HJ to Grace Carter, June 7, 1900, Henry James Papers, UVA, 6251 (Box 8:83).
31. HJ to unknown recipient, Jan. 29, 1894, Edel Papers, McGill. Note at the end by a researcher indicates that the proper date of the letter is Jan. 29, 1914, and another note indicates that this was “the date of Fenimore’s death.” It was close—Jan. 24 was the real date.
EPILOGUE: Remembrance
1. M.H., Letter to Editor, New York Times Saturday Review of Books, June 2, 1906, p. BR358.
2. See for instance, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Brooklyn Eagle, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 4; Margaret Sangster, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Bazar 27 (Feb. 3, 1894): 93; “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Critic 21 (Feb. 3, 1894): 73; “Books and Authors,” The Graphic (Chicago) (Feb. 10, 1894): 120; and “Editorial,” Godey’s Magazine 128 (Mar. 1894): 366. The Mather family scrapbook contains many more examples in (often unidentified) clippings. ECS quoted in “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” New York Tribune, Jan. 28, 1894, p. 14.
3. “Our London Correspondence,” Glasgow Herald, Jan. 30, 1894. The Illustrated London News, Feb. 3, 1894, p. 135.
4. Charles Dudley Warner, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 88 (May 1894): 967.
5. “Comment on New Books,” Atlantic Monthly 73 (May 1894): 705. “Fiction New and Old,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Mar. 11, 1894, p. 4. “Horace Chase,” The Critic 24 (Apr. 21, 1894): 270. “Recent Fiction,” The Interior 25 (Apr. 26, 1894): 536.
6. Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: The Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1987), xvi.
7. Benedict III, 603. John Hervey, “Sympathetic Art,” The Saturday Review of Art, Oct. 12, 1929; reprinted in Benedict II, 559.
8. See Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
9. Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870 (New York: Century, 1915); John Dwight Kern, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934); Lyon N. Richardson, “Constance Fenimore Woolson, ‘Novelist Laureate’ of America,” South Atlantic Quarterly 39 (Jan. 1940): 20–36.
10. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 203. See his many letters to Clare Benedict in Edel Papers, McGill. Rayburn Moore’s important academic study of CFW was also published at this time: Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York, Twayne, 1963).
11. See the work of Victoria Brehm, Cheryl Torsney, and Sharon Dean, among others, as well as Joan Myers Weimer, ed., Women Artists, Women Exiles: “Miss Grief” and Other Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). It was this anthology that first introduced me to CFW when I was a graduate student.
12. JH to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
13. Benedict III, 290.