Four more novels and a novella followed as well as more stories, travel sketches and poetry.įollowing her mother’s death Constance felt able to travel to Europe, something she had always wanted to do. In 1880 CFW published her first novel for adults Anne, she had however already published a children’s book under the pseudonym Anne March in 1873. Augustine in Florida for the winter, during these visits she was able to travel widely in the South, and these travels inspired several of her stories. During the 1870’s Constance accompanied her mother to St. CFW began publishing her fiction in the 1870’s after the death of her father, beginning with short stories. She and Clara were educated at the Cleveland female seminary and later at a boarding school in New York. As she grew up Constance had a particularly close to her sister Clara born a couple of years after her. A grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, Constance was to grow up in Cleveland, Ohio – where the family relocated when she was a baby following the deaths of three daughters to scarlet fever.

(From the Prologue to Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist)Ĭonstance Fenimore Woolson was born in 1840 in Claremont, New Hampshire, one of a large family of siblings – many of whom did not survive childhood. We also find a woman of great wit and compassion, a woman passionate about art, literature, and love, and a woman at war with herself – in short a woman as beguiling as any of James’s heroines.” We begin to see a powerful writer and conflicted woman who was not simply James’s follower but his friend and peer. When we do we see a life full of heartache, hope, and ambition that started in a conservative era and ended just as the New Woman was being born. “To begin to understand how Woolson ended up dying alone, in the cold street behind her home in Venice, we have to begin by looking at her life through her eyes instead of James’s. From never having heard of Constance Fenimore Woolson just a couple of months ago – I now feel like I know her very well indeed. However it is the narrative of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s life, her family, travels, writing and friendships which make this such an absorbing read. This biography is a brilliantly researched work, compulsively readable and detailed.

The author of this biography, Anne Boyd Rioux is doing a superb job in reigniting interest in her.

Today it seems she is best known for having had a very close friendship with Henry James and for having taken her own life. I’m famously bad at reading non-fiction these days – but the one type of non-fiction I am most likely to read is that of literary biography.Ĭonstance Fenimore Woolson was an American nineteenth century novelist, who seems to have slipped into obscurity.

Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson