The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson

Preface

Preface As I was much separated from my sister, our letters were much . . . We promised each other to be safety valves and also promised each other to destroy letters as soon as answered. Therefore, when she was taken, I was the only person who had no letters. How I missed her clear, strong, interesting letters! . . . And my kind of letter amused her; she said I told her things that no one else told her. Oh, that awful silence! Clara Benedict to Miss May Harris (Benedict/CFW, 387) Constance Fenimore Woolson’s letters, gathered for the first time in The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, remove Woolson not only from the “awful silence” that her sister Clara Benedict wrote of in her letter to May Harris, but also from the shadow of Henry James, with whom many scholars have associated her to the exclusion of the array of people, places, and ideas that shaped her large and varied life. Using this edition, scholars can now explore what David Barton and Nigel Hall have called the “social practice” of letter writing. They will be able to explore her relationship to family and friends, to writers and royalty, to artists and musicians , to the rich and the less affluent, to the eccentric and the ordinary. They will be able to read her body of work against her perceptions on politics and popular culture, art and economics, medicine and the environment. And they will hear the candor of a woman who shared her deepest thoughts not only with women friends but also with men to whom she wrote with extraordinary ease. Material developments in the nineteenth century allowed letter writing like Woolson’s to flourish. Stationery became available and affordable, and the easierto -use steel pen replaced the quill, though in Woolson’s case she often had to revert to the quill because of persistent pain in her hand, wrist, and arm. The Postal Act of 1792 created a national postal service in the United States and the Congressional Acts of 1845 and 1851 lowered the cost of stamps. In the first of her surviving letters, written in the late 1840s, the young Connie, who had received no valentines, asks an older friend if she had received any. While this may sound to the modern reader like the sad musings of a lonely girl, it should be, instead, a simple reminder that sending valentines became common only when postal rates declined. The steamship enabled Woolson and many like her to travel abroad, and the postal system enabled them to remain in contact with family and friends and with publishers to whom some sent manuscripts about their travels. As Mary Suzanne Schriber has • x · Preface traced, by the late nineteenth century many public letters from American women living abroad had progressed from using the voice of an amateur instructing readers in manners and civility to the voice of a committed and confident artist. Hotel letterhead began to appear and the fact that Woolson used it only at the end of her life when she was visiting Greece and Cairo reveals her preferred habit of staying not in hotels but in rooms of her own. Over and over again, Woolson wrote from Europe about how much she valued the letters and gifts she received through the mail, and she often complained that larger packages of books cost an exorbitant fee. Her lettersreveal ,aswell,theroleofbanksin theinternationalpostalsystem. Woolson was in contact with a variety of bankers, who always knew her whereabouts and could forward letters. The return addresses at the head of Woolson’s letters document the numerous places to which those letters were sent or forwarded. Some years, such as 1875 and 1881, must have been exhausting for a woman who longed for a permanent home. AsvaluableasIhopethisedition ofletterswillbein tracingWoolson’sresponses to the many places she wandered through, it cannot replicate the experience of reading the letters in their original form. We read differently if we read a magazine like Appletons’ Journal firsthand or on the Making of America website. Woolson’s letters make clear how much she worked at revisions between the magazine serialization of her novels and the book form. But not only are the texts different, so, too, the experience of reading any edition of letters is different from reading the original. In print editions, readers miss the feel of the paper, whether expensive or fragile, whether black-bordered mourning paper or a decorative card, and miss the way a writer positions the letter...