Constance Fenimore Woolson's For the Major and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady

Speculating about the unacknowledged influence of one writer on another is at best problematic, particularly if the writer in question never appears to have mentioned either the name or the works of a given predecessor. Nevertheless, one is impelled to make such a connection in order to add a new pair of authors to intertextual literary history and to suggest more about the creative process that gave rise to the later work. In this article I shall compare two American women authors who, to date, never have been linked: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Willa Cather. As I shall argue, Cather's celebrated novella A Lost Lady (1923) seems to have drawn upon Woolson's For the Major (1883) for character, setting, and plot. The similarities between these two novellas strongly suggest that Cather was influenced by her reading of Woolson's text although she never referred to Woolson or her work. In Part Two of A Lost Lady, however, Cather radically alters Woolson's Victorian novella, transforming it into a modernist work of fiction as she describes the changes that occur over time in the society and life of her own female protagonist.

In recent years, critics have begun to reassess Woolson's contribution to American letters. She has been compared to other American postbellum American women writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Edith Wharton. However, no one yet has linked Woolson to Cather. These two American women writers had much in common. They came from middle-class Protestant families; grew up in small towns located in the Midwest; never married; embraced writing as their profession; traveled extensively in America and Europe, setting their fiction in both locales; published poetry, essays, and well-received fiction; and frequently focused on women characters, as well as on the difficulties facing the American woman artist.

The most compelling case for Cather's indebtedness to Woolson can be made by comparing For the Major and A Lost Lady, published forty years later. Critics have discussed the probable intertextual links between Cather's novella and works by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Stendhal, and Kate Chopin.¹ However, Cather herself connected her own novella to her distant past in Red Cloud, Nebraska. When she had read the obituary of Lyra Garber, widow of the former state governor, Cather claimed, it brought back vivid memories of Silas Garber and his much younger second wife, who had lived in Cather's hometown when she was a child. "A Lost Lady was a beautiful ghost in my mind for twenty years before it came together as a possible subject for presentation," Cather said.² More important for my purposes here is what she later wrote to her friend Irene Miner: that the story she hoped to write about a character resembling Mrs. Garber came to her as though she had read it somewhere.³

Where might Cather have read about a story similar to the one she herself was planning to write? Although she never mentioned Woolson by name, it is entirely possible that Cather might have come across Henry James' tribute to his American friend "Miss Woolson" in an essay appearing in his Partial Portraits (1888), along with essays about Emerson, George Eliot, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgenev. In his essay about Woolson, James had observed that Woolson's tales were "full of interesting work," commending them for their "remarkable minuteness of observation" and their "high sense of the picturesque."⁴ His essay also contained commentaries on Woolson's fiction, including a brief discussion of For the Major. Worth noting is the fact that Cather, who called James "the most interesting American who was writing at the time,"⁵ once mentioned that she had read his Partial Portraits aloud in the living room of her friends the Seibels during the period when she was living in Pittsburgh.⁶ Given his mostly laudatory comments about the work of Woolson, it is also plausible to imagine that after reading James' essay Cather was prompted to read some of Woolson's writing, including For the Major, at a...