by Anne Boyd Rioux
DURING HER LIFETIME, THE WORDS MOST COMMONLY used to describe the writings of Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) were: “original,” “powerful,” “vigorous,” “artistic,” “sympathetic,” “true,” and “real.” She wrote five novels for adults and dozens of stories and was often compared with Henry James and George Eliot. The leading magazine and book publisher Harper & Brothers sought and received an exclusive contract with her. Her work was considered by many to be superior to that of any living American woman writer, and some believed she deserved the title of America’s “novelist laureate.” Henry James paid tribute to her in his collection Partial Portraits (1888), discovering in her stories about the Reconstruction-era South “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” In her landmark essay, “Woman in American Literature” (1890), Helen Gray Cone summed up Woolson’s reputation: “Few American writers of fiction have given evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature—these seem fitting words [to describe her]. Women have reason for pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.”1
When Woolson died in 1894, at the age of fifty-three, after falling from her third-story window in Venice, her friend and editor Henry Mills Alden called her “a true artist” whose writings possessed a “rare excellence, originality, and strength [that] were appreciated by the most fastidious critics.” In the New York Tribune, the influential poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, comparing her with Jane Austen and the Brontës, called her “one of the leading women in the American literature of the century.” Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and collaborator with Mark Twain, declared her “one of the first in America to bring the short story to its present excellence,” and wrote that her death was “deplored by the entire literary fraternity of this country.”2
Nonetheless, Woolson’s stellar reputation faded quickly. Already in 1906, a reader wrote to The New York Times, “Miss Woolson has done too much for America and Americans to be forgotten and ignored.” A tribute to her written by the Irish novelist Shan F. Bullock in 1920 suggests the particular value she had to those few who remembered her: “I venture to say that no writer living compares in power and art with Constance Woolson. …Had she lived, it is possible that in time she would have forced acknowledgment from a public that refuses even common notoriety to anything save commercial success. …But Miss Woolson, it seems, is forgotten. No one remembers her name, even.”3
At the height of her career, Woolson had managed that difficult combination of critical and commercial success. Yet none of her novels was as successful as her first, Anne (1882), which sold 57,000 copies, nearly ten times as many as Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, published a few months earlier. Some critics, most influentially William Dean Howells, had criticized her portraits of women, charging her with a lack of realism and/or morality, and had objected to the difficult themes of her later work, which tackled such subjects as domestic abuse and love outside of marriage. Still, these cannot explain the precipitous decline of her reputation. The growing suspicion in the modern era of expressions of genuine emotion quickly dated her work, which did not shy away from the portrayal of restrained passion and eruptions of powerful emotions, even though these were never the dominant themes of her work. Of even greater influence was the tendency by male critics to classify all women writers as minor as the American literary canon took shape at the turn of the century.4 Throughout the twentieth century, the narrative of separate literary spheres for men and women persisted, creating a neat split between the major male realists (such as James and Howells) and the minor female regionalists (such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman). Woolson’s work, which participated in both movements and crossed the gendered divides of her own day, fell through the cracks of the dominant narrative of American literary history.
Nonetheless, Woolson’s name was kept alive by a small cadre of appreciative critics from the 1920s through the 1960s, when Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel discovered that she was a significant figure in the famous author’s life and made her name once again more widely known.5 Yet Edel had dragged Woolson out of the shadows only to belittle her as a second-rate writer who had tried to ride the Master’s coattails. Feminist scholars, many of whom discovered Woolson through their research on James, helped to repair the damage by confirming the artistic and cultural value of her work and examining her pathbreaking life.6 Yet her friendship with James continues to overshadow her own significance as a writer, and the fact that her life ended in probable suicide has eclipsed her earlier accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a tragic victim of the male literary world’s (and her friend James’s) neglect.
Another disadvantage for Woolson’s reputation has been the fact that she cannot be aligned with one particular region, such as Jewett’s Maine or Kate Chopin’s Louisiana. Woolson traveled widely, and her writings reflect the breadth of her experience and vision. Her earliest stories were set in the Great Lakes region, near where she grew up, in Cleveland. After 1873, she set many of her stories in the Reconstruction-era South, particularly Florida, where she spent the winters with her invalid mother. After moving to Europe in late 1879, Woolson continued to set her novels in America but also wrote stories about American expatriates in Italy, Switzerland, and England. As a result, she was a pioneering regionalist without a region to call her own.
Coming of age as a writer at the same time as American literary realism, Woolson also made important contributions to that movement that have been greatly overlooked. She always insisted that her writings were taken directly from life as she observed it, which for her included characters’ hidden emotional lives, in addition to their inner consciousness or their social interactions, the usual terrain of most male realists. In his remembrance of her, Warner perfectly captured the essence of her achievement when he wrote, “She was a sympathetic [and] refined observer, entering sufficiently into the analytic mode of the time, but she had the courage to deal with the passions, and life as it is.”7
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, then a village of New England emigrants. Her parents moved there from New Hampshire shortly after her birth in 1840. She was the sixth child but would, by the age of thirteen, be the oldest survivor of the Woolson children, which also included a younger daughter and son. Despite so much sorrow, her parents were loving and nurtured her interests in literature and history. She was especially close to her father, Charles Jarvis Woolson, a stove manufacturer by trade and an avid reader, who had been a journalist in Boston and Charlottesville, Virginia, in the 1830s. He gave twelve-year-old Constance a complete set of Charles Dickens’s works and encouraged her early writing, none of which has survived. Her mother, Hannah Pomeroy Woolson, was a niece of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose example would exert a great influence on Constance’s career. However, it was her mother’s poor health, exacerbated by her grief for her lost children, that left a greater impression on Constance, who would grow up to be her mother’s caretaker.
After some early setbacks in the Woolson stove business, the family led an upwardly mobile and socially well-connected life in Cleveland. The Woolsons also had a summer home on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, and Constance and her father often visited Zoar, the Ohio German separatist community, both of which would become important settings for her early writing. Constance was a precocious reader and writer, but her family saw those activities as decidedly domestic. She was raised to be a cultured, well-educated young woman who would make a fine wife and mother someday. Even though she received a nearly college-level education at the Cleveland Female Seminary, her parents sent her, at seventeen, for a year of finishing school in New York and upon her graduation showed her off at Eastern resorts in hopes of finding her a husband. Woolson accepted her family’s view of her future, but she was also ambivalent about the overpowering nature of romantic love for women. During the Civil War, when Woolson was in her early to mid-twenties, she came under the spell of what she would later call “the glamor of the war” and fell in love with Zephaniah Spalding, an officer whom she had known from her summers on Mackinac Island.8 She expected to marry him; however, after the war, he moved to Hawaii, where he married a sugar heiress. It would be many years before Constance came to terms with the loss of her hopes for marriage and a family.
In the meantime, Constance had become the sole caretaker of her ailing parents. Then, when her father died in 1869, she lost her main emotional support. Unfortunately, he also left her and her mother without enough money to support themselves, and it soon became clear that she would have to find a way to earn a living. With the encouragement of her brother-in-law, George Benedict, part-owner of the Cleveland Herald, Woolson began publishing the writing she had been doing largely in secret. In July 1870, her first two publications, both travel sketches, appeared, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Magazine, two of the leading monthlies of the day. Soon she was sending witty and observant letters home from New York for publication in the Herald. After returning to Cleveland, she also published a children’s novel, The Old Stone House (1873), but soon decided to pursue her greater ambition for serious recognition as a literary artist, publishing a series of Great Lakes stories in the Atlantic Monthly, Appletons’ Journal, Scribner’s Monthly, and Harper’s.
Due to their limited funds and her mother’s ill health, Constance moved South in late 1873, staying over the next five years in Florida, both Carolinas, and Virginia. She explored the wild environs of St. Augustine, Florida, where she and her mother spent their winters, often delving into the swamps and pine barrens on her own. They also encountered white Southerners’ resentment of Northerners who flocked to the South in search of economic opportunity or a warmer climate. Everywhere, the scars of the Civil War were visible, in the dispirited faces of the people and in the cemeteries full of unmarked graves.
In February 1879, after her mother died from a short illness, Constance descended into a deep depression. She felt as if she had lost the one person in the world who gave her life purpose. Having suffered during the 1870s a few periods of acute depression, a tendency that she inherited from her father, Constance now faced a severe battle with what she once called “this deadly enemy of mine.”9 She had also inherited her father’s congenital deafness, which was now becoming severe and would increase her sense of isolation and exacerbate her tendency toward depression.
Hoping to break up Constance’s grief, her sister Clara decided to take her to Europe. They sailed in December 1879, and in Europe Woolson finally began to enjoy her new identity as an independent author. Meeting Henry James in Florence, in April 1880, she found a new friend to help deflect her grief. He found her amiable, despite being hard of hearing, and showed her around the galleries and gardens of Florence. She had hoped to meet him as something of a peer, but he had never heard of her and treated her chivalrously as a woman rather than respectfully as a fellow writer. It would take many more years of friendship, but eventually he would call her his “confrère.”10
Choosing not to return to the United States with her sister, Woolson stayed on in Europe, spending the winters in Florence or Rome and the summers in Switzerland, England, and Germany, getting to know many of the prominent British and American visitors and expatriates. Although her deafness was beginning to become a distinct social liability, Woolson still made many new friends in the early 1880s, among them William Dean Howells and his family. When the whirl of expatriate society threatened to encroach on her writing, she would often retreat from it to concentrate on her work.
In 1887, Woolson finally settled down in Europe, renting her own villa outside of Florence. There she became close to Henry James’s friends the American composer Francis Boott and his daughter, Lizzie, who was an artist and had recently married Frank Duveneck, her former art teacher. When the newlyweds had a child nine months later, Woolson was chosen to be his godmother. Enjoying the companionship of these de facto family members and the comforts of her own home, Woolson experienced the greatest contentment of her adult life, balancing writing in solitude with a supportive community. In the spring of 1887, James also came to visit and lived for a month under her roof in the downstairs apartment, during which time they began to develop a quasi-sibling relationship that would grow in the coming years.
However, when Lizzie Duveneck died in March 1888 and her father subsequently took the baby home to America to be raised by relatives, Woolson became despondent. Compounding her sense of loss were her fears about her precarious finances. In her attempt to maintain her villa, she had racked up large debts, which her nephew kindly paid. Although she earned decent money for her novels as well as modest interest from some American bonds, she worried for the rest of her life about money and her ability to support herself.
Her sister again tried to cure her grief and depression with travel, this time to Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land. Woolson was enchanted with Cairo, where she stayed on alone for three months in early 1890, during which time she felt herself reborn. She reveled in the exotic atmosphere of these foreign countries and developed a wider view of the world, learning to no longer “look down” on the Middle East from a “superior Anglo-Saxon standpoint.”11
Although she longed to continue her travels, Woolson returned to England, knowing it would best allow her to work without interruption. She lived for over a year in Cheltenham, but she found it too dull and moved to Oxford in 1891. Now closer to London, she began to see James more frequently and traveled often to the city, where she took in plays and visited galleries. She also tried a new remedy for her growing deafness, artificial eardrums, which worked briefly but then caused severe pains that she found difficult to endure. Meanwhile the Russian flu epidemic had reached England, causing Oxford to shut down for the first time in living memory.
Leaving England for Venice in June 1893, Woolson regretted leaving her friend James behind but hoped he would visit her in Italy as soon as he could. In Venice, she tried to recuperate from the flu she had contracted just before her departure, as well as the depression and physical collapse she often experienced after completing a novel. She spent the summer and fall floating in gondolas through the canals and out among the islands in the lagoon, solidifying friendships within the small expatriate community there and searching for an apartment where she could settle down again. She found temporary lodgings on the Grand Canal and brought her belongings out of storage from Florence, gathering around her the many reminders of her friends Boott and the Duvenecks.
During the six months Woolson lived in Venice, she tried hard to relieve the depression and ill health troubling her and planned to start writing again on January 1, 1894. However, as the new year dawned, she felt writing had become too great a strain for her to continue. She fell ill and began preparing for her death, although the doctor thought she was in no danger. During a sleepless night, around midnight of January 24, she instructed the nurse to fetch a special cup for her milk. When the nurse returned, she found the window open and Woolson on the pavement three stories below. The servants brought her upstairs, but she never regained consciousness, living only a few hours.
Although many believed that Woolson took her own life, her preparations for her death—most important, a will—were incomplete at her death. Weakened by her recent illness, she may have fallen as she opened the window for fresh air. This was her family’s firm belief. There are strong indications, however, that Woolson, who despaired of finding a home she could afford and of continuing to make her living as a writer, was ready to die. A firm believer in an afterlife that would solve the “cruel riddles” of this existence, she may have hastened her way there.12
Woolson was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, as she had earlier requested of her caretakers. The funeral was attended by a small group of mourners, expatriates who, like her, had not seen their homelands in many years. One of her closest friends, James, remained in London, prostrated by grief. Her memory would haunt him for many years, making its way into some of his later works, such as The Beast in the Jungle and The Wings of the Dove, in which he portrayed women who loved selflessly and unrequitedly. Yet Woolson’s insistence on being buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, amid so many famous foreign writers and artists who had died in Italy, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, indicates how much she hoped to be remembered in her own right—as an important writer rather than simply as a tragic inspiration to others.
WOOLSON’S WRITINGS WERE so intimately tied to the places she traveled to and lived that they can be divided into three periods: the Great Lakes fiction of the early- to mid-1870s, the Southern fiction of the mid- to late-1870s, and the European fiction of the 1880s and early 1890s. This classification applies only to the short stories and travel narratives, however. The settings of her novels stayed firmly in the United States, even when she was thousands of miles away. As she once explained, she would never be able to set a novel in Europe because all of her deepest feelings were “inseparably associated with home-scenes …[t]he Lake-country & Mackinac, the beautiful South, the farming-country of Ohio.”13
Her list of “home-scenes” did not include her original home, Cleveland, which she felt had been spoiled by the rise of industry and the spread of blast furnaces and petroleum refineries. Instead, she listed the places she had loved best to visit. Although traditionally women had written primarily from the vantage point of their homes, Woolson was inspired to write by the new scenes she encountered on her travels. The landscapes that most attracted her were those that remained largely untouched. She spent much of her youth exploring nature: rowing, hiking, and studying flora and fauna. In adulthood, she was a devoted botanist, with a particular love of ferns, and many of her American stories are filled with the observations of a naturalist, particularly “St. Clair Flats,” “Sister St. Luke,” and “The South Devil.” She was also drawn to places that bore the marks of Old World influence, through immigration or colonization, such as Zoar and St. Augustine. She regretted the way Americans, particularly in the Midwest, valued the new over the old and thus erased all evidence of the past, be it the American wilderness or earlier human habitation. James would later write of her early stories, “she has a remarkable faculty of making the New World seem ancient.”14
Critics applauded Woolson for discovering so many new scenes and expanding Americans’ view of their nation in the wake of the Civil War. Although some questioned the veracity of her works, Woolson was adamant that she drew strictly from life in the creation of her settings, plots, and characters. She also insisted on the importance of making her readers feel for her characters, who are often misunderstood and overlooked. While many of her contemporaries portrayed their provincial characters comically, Woolson portrayed without sentimentality social outsiders struggling for dignity, love, and respect. Her literary aesthetic can best be described as empathetic realism, a mode that she adapted from George Eliot, the favorite author of her early adulthood, and that she maintained even as she came to know and admire the analytic realism found in James’s works.
In spite of practicing what might seem a more feminine version of realism, Woolson (like Eliot) was considered a quasi-masculine writer for writing realistically at all, and she understood herself as entering into a male sphere of literature. She regretted that, in her view, “women are prone to run off into the beautiful at the expense of strength.” She had “such a horror of ‘pretty,’ ‘sweet’ writing” that she was willing to risk “a style that was ugly and bitter, provided it was also strong.” Throughout her career, in fact, she sought out the companionship and support of influential male writers. The first such was the New York poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. With his encouragement—he told her he found her stories as powerful as some of Hawthorne’s—she was able to ignore the critics who expected her to write more sentimentally and preferred moral endings (like punishment for evil deeds) rather than what she felt was more “artistic and truthful-to-life.”15 She became known, in fact, for her refusal to end her stories happily.
Woolson’s earliest stories, set in the Great Lakes, many of which were published in Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875), were atypical for women writers of her day, peopled as they were with miners, missionaries, and male adventurers. Often writing from a male point of view, she also exposed the limitations of her male characters, who generally assumed the superiority of their sophisticated, masculine view of the world. In many of these stories, she carefully examined the way some men observed women and held them to a narrow set of expectations, refusing to acknowledge their full humanity. For instance, in “St. Clair Flats,” the narrator’s male friend can see no pathos in the isolated life of a religious zealot’s wife; in “Jeanette,” an officer on Mackinac Island who, against his better judgment, falls in love with a half-Indian girl is surprised when she refuses him; and in “The Lady of Little Fishing,” a female missionary loses the respect of her all-male flock when she falls in love with a degenerate fur trapper.
As Woolson moved south, she extended her empathetic gaze to new regions, types, and conflicts. Her Southern stories, collected in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), dealt extensively with the effects of the war on the South and the intrusions of Northerners into a beautiful and sometimes hostile region. Although the North was eager to forget the Civil War and Woolson was cautioned by one publisher against writing any more about it, she continued to portray white and black Southerners struggling to rebuild their lives. In stories such as “Rodman the Keeper,” “In the Cotton Country,” and “Old Gardiston,” she acknowledged the bitterness of the former planter class and allowed those who had lost everything to speak for themselves, at a time when their real-life counterparts had virtually no means of telling their own stories. In “King David,” she depicted the racism of a white Northerner who has come south to educate freed slaves, ultimately giving voice to one of the students, who rejects David’s feeble attempts at understanding. Woolson’s Florida stories, such as “Sister St. Luke,” “Felipa,” and “The South Devil,” reveled in the exotic, wild landscape and portrayed Northern visitors who have a hard time accepting the carefree lifestyle of the locals, particularly Minorcans, an ethnic group from the Spanish island of Minorca. Once again, Woolson allowed these marginalized characters, particularly in “Felipa,” to speak back to the unwitting tourists trying to understand them.
Having made important contributions to the rise of the short story in the post–Civil War period, Woolson then set her sights on a bid for the Great American Novel, turning to what she knew best, the lives of women. Drawing inspiration from Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, she wrote Anne (1882), the coming-of-age story of an unconventional young woman, much like herself, growing up on Mackinac Island and forced to make her way in the world after the death of her father. The opening chapters are themselves a regional masterpiece, a loving portrait of the island and its remarkable inhabitants, including a New England spinster, a French priest, Anne’s mixed-race (Native American and white) half siblings, and her Thoreau-like naturalist-philosopher father. Determined to write a national novel, however, Woolson left Mackinac behind and followed Anne to a finishing school in New York, a fashionable Eastern resort, the battlefields of West Virginia during the Civil War (where Anne is a nurse), and ultimately to the rural hinterland of the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, where Anne must solve a murder in order to free the man she loves. At its core, however, Anne remains a story about a young woman discovering her considerable strengths and talents at a time when women were expected to hide them and remain at home. Anne does neither and thus joins the pantheon of literature’s iconoclastic heroines.
Woolson’s next novel was much less ambitious but more finely crafted. For the Major (1883) is the portrait of an isolated mountain village near Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the Civil War. At its center is a wife’s attempts to hide from her husband her former marriage and motherhood. It subtly critiques the infantilization of women as it insists on the wife’s noble self-sacrifices for her husband. Ultimately, For the Major provides a rather startling exposé of the duplicities that marriage requires. In Woolson’s fiction, women know that they must play the roles men want to see them in, if they are to win men’s affection.
This theme emerged in many of Woolson’s short stories of the period as well. In “A Florentine Experiment” and “The Château of Corinne,” for instance, Woolson’s female characters openly denounce men’s expectations that women behave simply and adoringly. During the early years of her friendship with James, Woolson also returned to the theme of failed artists that she had first explored in “Solomon,” one of her Great Lakes stories. “‘Miss Grief,’” “The Street of the Hyacinth,” and “Château” most vividly portray the defeat of female writers and artists who possess the same serious ambitions that Woolson harbored, reflecting the crisis of confidence occasioned by her engagement with European art and culture, as well as her friendship with James. A later story, “In Sloane Street,” never published in book form until now, again picks up these themes, showing how astutely Woolson observed James and inferred his disapproval of women writers.
In these and other stories, Woolson also began experimenting with the analytical style James was known for, emphasizing description and character analysis over plot. While she felt this style had much to offer, she lamented its lack of feeling. Nowhere does she more overtly seek to redress this deficiency, infusing analysis with intense emotions, than in her third novel, East Angels (1886), set in the region near St. Augustine. In this work she answered James directly by rewriting, to a degree, The Portrait of a Lady. Woolson had earlier written to James that she couldn’t tell whether Isabel Archer really loved Osmond, for if Isabel had, surely “heart-breaking, insupportable, killing grief” would have followed his betrayal.16 In East Angels, Woolson exposes her heroine Margaret’s great, suppressed passion, showing the severe emotional costs of the self-renunciation she and similarly Isabel practiced. Woolson wanted to reveal what women, in their ordinary lives, could not. As Margaret explains, “We go through life, …more than half of us—women, I mean—obliged always to conceal our real feelings.”17 As in so many of Woolson’s works, this concealment has both emotional and physical consequences. The mind affects the body in mysterious ways that male physicians are helpless to understand or remedy, a theme Woolson explored most fully in her Italian story “Dorothy.”
Her darkest work, her fourth novel, even more fully exposes the dangers of passionate love for women. Jupiter Lights (1889), set in the Carolinas and the Great Lakes, shows how love leads in one character’s case to submission to an abusive husband and in another’s to thoughts of suicide. While Margaret in East Angels resists the forceful persuasion of her would-be lover and thus preserves the inviolability of her deepest self, the heroine of Jupiter Lights, Eve, finds herself unable to turn her lover away, however degrading she feels her love for him is. His autocratic form of love renders Eve powerless. Should he even grow to hate her, she realizes, she would be happy simply to be near him and fold his shirts. In Jupiter Lights, more than in any other work, Woolson contributed to the development of literary naturalism in her exploration of the inherent weaknesses of her characters, from inherited alcoholism to the self-destructive nature of romantic love.
In her final novel, Horace Chase (1894), she strove to be thoroughly modern. Set in Asheville and St. Augustine, it portrayed a self-made businessman of the Gilded Age and his young wife, who has married him for money but later discovers real love for another man. As in so many of her works, Woolson portrayed a pair of women, one ultra-feminine and beloved, the other intellectual and unnoticed. Usually she subtly exposed the silent suffering of the less conventional woman, but here she made her vapid beauty discover the pain of unrequited love. In the end, when the wife confesses her adulterous feelings to her husband, he forgives her, proving himself to be a more noble and complex character than he at first appeared. Outside of the main couple, the novel also contains an array of contemporary types, such as the mannish female sculptor who smokes and determines that men’s kisses leave much to be desired and the invalid sister who cynically comments from her couch on the conventional lives of those around her.
After Woolson’s death, Harper & Brothers published two volumes of her European stories, The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896). The most remarkable of the stories not already mentioned is “A Front Yard,” which portrays a sturdy New England spinster (a recurring type in Woolson’s fiction) who takes on the care of her ungrateful stepchildren after the death of her Italian husband, all the while trying to create the New England garden of her dreams. “A Transplanted Boy,” one of the last stories Woolson wrote, heartbreakingly depicts a young expatriated American boy who has lost all connection with his homeland and nearly starves himself in an attempt to provide for his ailing mother. It expresses the loneliness and financial fears that haunted Woolson in her final months.
Woolson’s works deserve wider attention today, not only for the way they broaden our understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literature, but also for the way they capture both the social texture of her time and the inner emotional lives of her characters. Her works contradict our assumptions about women’s writing from that era, for Woolson did not seek recognition as a woman writer but as a writer. Thus she often tread on masculine territory in her work, while never trying to simply mimic the successes of her male peers. She sought instead to show them what was missing from their views of humanity, broadening the scope of literature to include the heartaches and triumphs of those most often overlooked, such as impoverished spinsters, neglected nuns, self-sacrificing wives and widows, uneducated coal miners, and destitute Southerners. Most of all her writings reflect what is deeply human in all of us, particularly our need to be loved, to be understood, and to belong, none of which are easily accomplished in her stories, or in life.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The text of each story that follows is taken from its book publication, except for “In Sloane Street,” which was never published in a book. As the collections from which the stories come were published by four different publishers, their styles in terms of spacing and punctuation vary. These variations have been silently corrected, conforming to modern usage. For instance, what appeared as “is n’t” in the original now appears as “isn’t,” and spaces around em dashes, which varied widely in the original stories, have been closed. Spelling inconsistencies from one text to the next have been allowed to stand. In a few cases, where spelling inconsistencies existed within the same story, these have been silently corrected or noted. “In Sloane Street” presented special challenges because the original magazine publication is difficult to read and contained more errors than the stories published in books. Obvious errors, as with the few scattered in the other stories, have been silently corrected. Otherwise, the integrity of the original documents has been observed as closely as possible.