The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson by Sharon Dean, ed. (review)

Scholars of Constance Fenimore Woolson owe Sharon Dean a great debt, as do scholars of Henry James, considering that Woolson was one of his closest friends. Dean has single-handedly advanced immeasurably the study of this remarkable author, whose works are exposed to ever sharper, more complex modes of analysis, but whose life has remained shadowy at best.¹

Thus far we have seen Woolson’s life primarily through the lens of early male interpreters, who misunderstood many aspects of her life and had few sources on which to draw,² then through the eyes of feminist scholars who (continuing to struggle with the paucity of biographical evidence) viewed her primarily through her works,³ and then, perhaps most influentially, through the eyes of Henry James’s biographers.⁴ Now, with the publication of The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, it is possible to see Woolson’s life and the place of Henry James within it more clearly than ever before. New readings of her life and their mystifying friendship will certainly emerge as a result.

In these pages, we can finally hear Woolson speaking for herself on a range of topics. Here she is fuming about the reaction to her early realistic stories to the critic Edmund Clarence Stedman: “one person, a literary man too, has given me up as hopelessly lost,—altogether gone astray into the hard realistic tendencies of the day. ‘Solomon’ was bad, it seems. But ‘Peter’ is a great deal ‘badder.’ I think of going to live on a desert island. Will you make me a visit once a year?” (16). Here she is commenting on her stormy relationship with powerful editor William Dean Howells: “If [End Page E-11] I please him, I am glad; if I do not please him, I am not in the least dismayed. He is a man of strong and peculiar tastes, and (I fancy) subject to caprices” (66). And here she shares her views on women’s education with Katharine Loring:

I think the plan an excellent one. It opens a new field for women, & one that belongs to them fairly; one for which they are fitted. But do insist that they shall be educated with the students of the other sex, and not kept by themselves; it is the only way, in my opinion, to widen the feminine mind. Do not suppose from that that I think the feminine mind inferior to the masculine. For I do not. But it has been kept back, and enfeebled, & limited, by ages of ignorance, & almost servitude.

(421)

In other words, Woolson comes alive to us through these letters. As they show, she was as witty and vivacious as her published writings would lead us to believe and, contrary to the general image of her, she was hardly a lonely recluse. She corresponded with and about dozens of her contemporaries in the U.S. and Europe. The list of royalty alone, some of whom she met in person, is so long that Dean has created a separate list of them in her Appendix of Names.

The greatest service Dean has done for scholars is to assemble all (or nearly all) of Woolson’s letters between two covers. (The press made the wise decision to publish them in one volume.) She has collected letters scattered over thirty-two archives in the U.S. and Europe, reassembled as best she could the fragments of letters cut up and pasted into books by Woolson’s niece Clare Benedict, and provided more accurate transcriptions of those letters that have been previously published. It is now possible, for the first time, for scholars to gain a sense of the arch of Woolson’s life, as well as the vividness of her wit and the variety of moods she experienced, ranging from ecstasy over her home at Bellosguardo to her despondency over her brother’s suicide. Through it all, Woolson clung to a New England stoicism she inherited from her...