Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy

3. Constance Woolson and Death in Venice

Constance Fenimore Woolson, 1840–1894 3. Constance Woolson and Death in Venice On a sunny February day when I stood in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome at the 150th memorial service for John Keats, who was buried there in 1821, it was just a month since my husband had died suddenly in Rome and I was remembering him, poet, too. After the service for Keats, I wandered a bit in that lovely and haunting spot, once a scorned waste area located at the edges of the city overlooked by the ancient Pyramid of Gaius Cestius and designated for the burial of non-Catholics. By the nineteenth century , it was a walled and flowering oasis, greened with cypress and filled with evocative names, with nostalgia and serenity. Markers now point the way to the gravesites of Goethe’s young son and Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party. Shelley ’s stone, inscribed Cor Cordium, is on the slope near the old Roman wall. And if I had been familiar with her work at that time I would have noted that next to American author Richard Henry Dana lay the ivy- and violet-covered mound of his compatriot and friend, the nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, 1840–94. I was not alone in not knowing of her. In Eleanor Clark’s Rome, and a Villa, the chapter on the Protestant Cemetery mentions the burial places of artists and clergymen, even noting Edith Wharton ’s aunt and uncle, before mistakenly writing, ‘‘Novelists none. . . .’’ Constance Fenimore Woolson, a great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, grew up in Ohio, then spent much time in the post85 bellum South becoming a successful writer of regional novels. In her lifetime a uniquely connected and successful author, she chose to live abroad the last fifteen years of her life. It was in Italy that she was befriended by Henry James, who politely praised her fiction but maintained a distance from the closer connection she seemed to invite. She remained single her entire life. Her quest, to reconcile her woman’s nature with her art (epitomized in her poignant query, ‘‘Why is it that literary ladies break down so?’’), came to tragic end when, alone and ill in Venice, she jumped to her death. Henry James called her gravesite ‘‘the most beautiful thing in Italy almost. . . . It is tremendously, inexhaustibly touching .’’ His words seem to prenote his story ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle,’’ of a life wasted when love went unrecognized. I see Woolson ’s shadow in his work, and his in hers. Italy had been a destination in young Connie Woolson’s imagination since her school-days at Cleveland Seminary where she was set dreaming by the evocative name of a classmate, Italia Beatrice . ‘‘There were romantic horizons to me in the name!’’ she recalled years later when she had already lived much in Italy and found it as she had imagined. And hadn’t James Fenimore Cooper, the illustrious great-uncle on whom she had been raised, found his greatest delight and pleasure there, too? Italy was the country in Europe Woolson most loved; and although her long residence at Villa Brichieri in Florence was a happy period that provided the closest approximation to a fixed home she had had in twenty years, she could not, as Margaret Fuller did, embrace Italy wholeheartedly as destination and destiny. Rather, she came and went moved by uncertainty and some inner longing, but always returning, hoping, perhaps, that it would be for her what it had been for Shelley: the paradise of exiles. Essentially hers was a misconnect with Italy. Aside from seeming the model of May Bartram in ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle,’’ or the spurned spinster niece in The Aspern Papers, 86 Their Other Side or the forsaken Milly Thiele of Wings of the Dove, who was Constance Woolson in her own right? I wondered. She seems the epitome of the woman writer, the seeker of some resolution between life and art that is the quest of creative women. She was greatly conflicted in her life; always insecure both as writer and person, she felt herself on the margins of both society and literature. For me, she embodies a mirror image of Italy. The lure of so much promise of beauty, health, love, or whatever fulfillment for so many, Italy has a dark verso to the bright side. Some who journeyed to...