The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson ed. by Sharon L. Dean (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson ed. by Sharon L. Dean
Scholars interested in Constance Fenimore Woolson and nineteenth-century American women's writing more broadly owe a debt of gratitude to Sharon L. Dean for her meticulous edition of Woolson's letters. Several decades into the recovery of nineteenth-century American women's fiction, scholars still lack the essential scholarly tools for informed critical and biographical work on their subjects, such as scholarly editions of authors' letters. There are a few modern complete letters volumes for fiction writers (e.g., Augusta Jane Evans, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton) and some selected letters volumes (e.g., Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stoddard). For the most part, however, scholars unable or unwilling to travel to archives, pay for photocopies or scans, or order microfilm through interlibrary loan find themselves relying on highly selective, dubiously edited nineteenth-or early-twentieth-century selected letters volumes. Scholarship on, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe necessarily suffers in comparison to that on Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville because of this lack.
Dean's edition provides access to a rich archive of letters written by a woman author with a distinctive voice and decided opinions. Woolson negotiates with magazine editors and book publishers and keenly queries others concerning their knowledge about and experiences with the same literary venues; her descriptions of her engagements with the Atlantic Monthly and her [End Page 409] sense that the editors play favorites are particularly interesting. Woolson is acutely aware of how gender shapes public perception of women authors and their works, although she seems ambivalent about being classed with her literary sisters. She seems mystified by the praise of William Dean Howells and other male tastemakers for Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's poetry, for example, and when she meets Phelps in person at a resort in Florida, she is mildly snarky, commenting wryly about Phelps's devotion to dress reform. In her comments on the most popular women novelists of the day, such as Augusta Evans and E. D. E. N. Southworth, and the women readers devoted to them, she is unsparingly condescending. A voracious reader herself, her letters document and provide a rich running commentary on her wide-ranging reading.
Woolson spent much of her career traveling, first spending time in the southern United States because her mother's frail health required a warm climate, and then, after her mother's death, traveling around Europe to take advantage of the low cost of living and the cultural amenities. She met Henry James in Europe, and they were neighbors in Italy. Woolson has, as Dean notes in her preface, too often been put in James's shadow, with his biographers assuming that Woolson committed suicide in 1894 because of her unrequited love for The Master. Even though only four of Woolson's letters to James survive, there are references to him in many other letters, including those written well before she met him (she was suspicious of his status as an Atlantic Monthly favorite). Dean's volume makes it possible to consider this relationship more fully from Woolson's end, and despite the inevitable gaps in the record, one comes away convinced that Woolson had no romantic feelings for James and that her suicide had nothing to do with him. Instead, one is impressed with the critical verve of her letters to him, which make clear she admired his talent but was not an uncritical fan. Her astute critique of the faults of James's incomplete representation of the heroine of A Portrait of a Lady is a delight to read.
There are disadvantages to the complete letters approach. An editor who selects letters can use a volume to tell a story (or a series of stories) or can choose the most artful, satisfying, or revealing epistolary performances. Dean, because she attempts comprehensiveness, necessarily takes a strictly chronological approach. This leaves readers attempting to read the volume from beginning to end confronting many odd juxtapositions...
