Constance Fenimore Woolson Read online

  Constance

  Fenimore

  Woolson

  PORTRAIT OF A LADY NOVELIST

  ANNE BOYD RIOUX

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY / NEW YORK / LONDON

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  To the members of the

  Constance Fenimore Woolson Society

  Contents

  PROLOGUE:

  Portraits

  PART ONE / An Education in Womanhood • (1840–1869)

  1. A Daughter’s Country

  2. Lessons in Literature, Life, and Death

  3. Turning Points

  PART TWO / An Education in Authorship • (1870–1879)

  4. False Starts

  5. Departures

  6. Dark Places

  PART THREE / A European Experiment • (1879–1886)

  7. The Old World at Last

  8. The Artist’s Life

  9. The Expatriate’s Life

  PART FOUR / The Bellosguardo Years • (1886–1889)

  10. Home Found

  11. Confrère

  12. Arcadia Lost

  PART FIVE / The Final Years • (1890–1894)

  13. To Cairo and Back

  14. Oxford

  15. The Riddle of Existence

  16. Aftershocks

  EPILOGUE:

  Remembrance

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Constance Fenimore Woolson

  PROLOGUE

  Portraits

  On January 24, 1894, a woman jumps from the third-story window of her Venetian palazzo. She has been ill for almost two weeks but has told none of her family or closest friends, who include the novelist Henry James. Instead, she dies alone, with only a nurse and a doctor at her side, her life of misery and neglect finally over. If only James had loved her, he later thinks, she might not have jumped.

  In May 1894 James comes to Venice to help the woman’s sister and niece clean out her apartment. He destroys all evidence of their friendship and then rows out into a lagoon with her dresses. He tries to drown them, but they billow up like black balloons that won’t be submerged. For years afterward, the woman who wore them haunts the Master’s imagination, living on in his fiction. She appears most notably as May Bartram, the self-sacrificing, all-loving, and overlooked friend of the self-absorbed John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle.”

  THESE MURKY vignettes are the extent of what most people know about the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, if they know of her at all. Not unlike those ominous, unsinkable dresses, these images continue to crop up in biographies, literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, despite their questionable veracity.1 Although Woolson was widely considered one of the most accomplished American women writers of the late nineteenth century, what remains in the collective memory are stories of her unrequited love for James and her consequent suicide. These two doubtful details have overshadowed the rest of her daring life, which included travels throughout the U.S. South during Reconstruction, fourteen years of wandering in Europe, an extended trip to Egypt, and a decades-long inquiry into the art of fiction and the pressures of convention on women’s lives. Raised to be a traditional wife and mother, Woolson became instead a world traveler and serious writer who sought not only a means of support and celebrity but critical recognition and lasting fame, highly unusual aims for a woman of her time. As a result, the road she chose was at times painful and lonely. But she also possessed a tremendous capacity for joy and a wonderful tenacity in the face of suffering.

  Her life story has never been fully or adequately told in large part because it has been eclipsed by James’s. Putting Woolson in the center of the frame, however, allows new scenes to emerge, displacing those of third-story windows and ballooning black dresses.

  We can see, for instance, a shy, precocious girl, with long curls and pursed lips, watching intently as the grown-ups gathered in the parlor play literary and historical games. She hangs on their every word, her eyes brightening when she hears something that interests her.

  In another view, she has grown into a young woman who runs out into the street when she hears the call of a newspaper boy proclaiming the latest headlines of the war. She buys one of the papers and scours it instantly for news of a certain regiment headed by the man she expects to marry, if he returns.

  Many years later we see her, dressed smartly but plainly, walking along Manhattan’s bustling Fifth Avenue, her keen eyes storing up all she observes of the fashionable elite for the witty, irreverent letters she writes for a newspaper back home.

  In another scene, she is walking on top of the seawall that snakes along the shores of St. Augustine, Florida, deep in conversation with the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. She betrays her feelings with a grateful smile. He is the first man to listen seriously to all of her hopes and plans for her career.

  In Florence she stands in one of the side chapels of Santa Croce. At her side the writer and critic Henry James explains the significance of the Giotto murals. Having become quite deaf in adulthood, she watches him intently, reading his lips. She imagines his mystification over her attention and begins to plan a playful story about a man who thinks a woman must want to marry him because she hangs on his every word as he holds forth on Florentine art.

  A few years further into the future she sits at a desk in a hotel room in Sorrento, Italy, gazing out across the sapphire Bay of Naples toward smoldering Mount Vesuvius. She has always liked to be up high, where the air is clearest and she feels suspended above life’s cares. On her desk is a pile of letters about her first novel, then running serially in Harper’s, from fellow writers and fans. One, from her publisher, encloses a check doubling her pay. In her excitement she writes to James of her triumph, but she soon regrets it. Her feelings of insecurity, in spite of her novel’s great success, overwhelm her.

  Many years later, worn out from the cares of housekeeping and the hard labor of writing, she seeks refuge and renewal in Egypt. We can find her on top of a donkey pulled by a young boy through the streets of Cairo in search of as many ornately decorated mosques as she can find. When she arrives at the doorstep of one, the attendant looks at her in shock. No Westerners ever visit, for the mosque is not listed in the guidebooks. But that is why she has come.

  There are countless other scenes—some sad, some joyous—that make up the life of a woman hungry for uplifting sights and rich experiences. Her appreciation of the noble and beautiful in life knew no bounds. Yet she also possessed a keen empathy for suffering, so much so that at times it engulfed her. The six novels and dozens of stories she produced were meant to remind readers of their shared humanity and to represent life in all its complexity. She knew, as we must, that no life is without its love and its fury, its awe and its anguish. Hers was no different.

  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. 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. We begin to see a powerful writer and conflicted woman who was not simply James’s follower but his friend and peer. 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.

  If we look at Woolson when she first knew James, in the early 1880s, we see a very different figure than the one of popular imagination. She was more like another James character, Isabel Archer, than May Bartram—more independent than devoted, more self-directed than self-sacrificing. When Woolson first read The Portrai
t of a Lady, a copy of which James sent to her, inscribed, “Constance Fenimore Woolson. / from her friend & servant / Henry James,” she felt as if she were looking into a mirror. She had always been, like Isabel, full of ideas of her own and eager to express them. As Isabel first encounters Europe, in the first half of the novel, her great charm is her openness to new sensations, her fondness for her own liberty, and her independent mind. She is unattached and free to make her own way in life. In her twenties, Woolson wrote words that could just as easily have come from the lips of James’s character: “[A]lthough I am willing to settle down after thirty years are told, I do not care to be forced into quiescence yet awhile.”2

  Isabel Archer was an exceptional creation because she seemed determined to choose her own path in life. James wrote of her, “She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.”3 Woolson, by coming to Europe, free for the first time in her life after her parents’ deaths, was charting her own path as well. When James first met her, in the spring of 1880, as he was writing the novel that would become his masterpiece, he saw in his new friend no small portion of the spirit he was trying to capture on the page. No wonder he took time off from his work to show her around the museums and churches of Florence for four weeks.

  After reading the novel, Woolson confessed to feeling with Isabel “a perfect sympathy, & comprehension, & a complete acquaintance as it were.” She knew Isabel as well as she knew herself. Like her, Woolson did not conform to most men’s idea of an agreeable woman. She was too self-contained, in the terminology of the day. Neither possessed the uncomplicated, undiscriminating nature prized in women. They were “idealizing [and] imaginative . . . , sure to be terribly unhappy.” 4

  When James first conceived of Isabel, he assumed, as he had about his cousin Minny Temple, on whom she was primarily based, that independence must breed unhappiness. The world was too small for women’s expansive minds. Neither Minny nor Isabel would be able to find outlets for their keen observing intellects. James created for Isabel what he imagined Minny’s fate might have been, had she not died young: entrapment in a marriage that had seemed as if it would fulfill her greatest desires for mental companionship. In the end, Isabel’s husband, Gilbert Osmond, comes to resent his wife “having a mind of her own at all.”5 James was sure that women like Minny and Isabel would find that the world as it existed did not match their aspirations. It was not ready for them.

  Woolson agreed. For she didn’t believe the world was entirely ready for her either, at least not the woman she wanted to be. Her fiction reflects that belief. It is full of strong, sometimes ambitious women, who, like Isabel, are often caged in the end. In her own life, Woolson clung to the cover of convention, hoping no one would notice how ambitious she really was. She would play the devoted friend to distract James from their obvious rivalry. But she could not hide the fact that she too was intent on making her own destiny. In one important way she was different from Isabel and Minny, however: she lived past the dangerous age of enticement and disillusionment to discover the virtues of independence in her thirties. She had just turned forty when she met James in Florence. She had already chosen her path in life by becoming an author.

  James’s portrait of Isabel was a bit audacious—“How did you ever dare write a portrait of a lady?” Woolson taunted him.6 In spite of his boldness, however, he could not imagine the key to Isabel’s character that would have allowed her true independence—ambition. He had given her the soul of an artist without the drive or talent to realize it. Her genius, therefore, is channeled into living rather than creating. The man she adores, Osmond, tells her to make her life a work of art, and she allows him to convince her that being his wife will satisfy her desires for beauty and usefulness—for art, in other words. What she doesn’t know is that she will become an ornament, a work of art for his consumption alone.

  Much of what we think we know of nineteenth-century women’s lives comes from men’s portraits of them—the fictional as well as the historical—with James’s Isabel Archer at or near the head of the list. Woolson, however, was much more than James or even she could imagine on the page: a woman artist as committed to her writing as he was. Imagine Isabel with the ambition of her creator, with the desire not simply to make her life a work of art but to make art from her life. Would it be possible for her to realize her ambitions and satisfy her desires for intellectual and emotional companionship? Could she gain the respect and friendship of her male peers? Could she be happy choosing art over a conventional woman’s life? These were the questions at the heart of Woolson’s life.

  Her life has been called, like Isabel’s, tragic. But that is far from the whole story. That she dared to live as only men had previously done—to devote herself to a serious literary career over family and domesticity—makes her courageous, not tragically flawed. How she became one of the first women writers to make such a life for herself, and the particular demons that haunted her along the way—that is the story to be told.

  PART ONE

  An Education

  in Womanhood

  1840–1869

  “For girls . . . their ‘land’ is their father, or mother, one or both; wherever the father or mother is, that is a daughter’s country.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  “[T]he war was the heart and spirit of my life.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  1

  A Daughter’s Country

  ON MARCH 5, 1840, a healthy, plump little girl was born to Hannah and Charles Jarvis Woolson in the riverside village of Claremont, New Hampshire. They named her Constance. Before they had time to adjust to the fact that yet another girl, their sixth, had been born to them, the older ones fell ill. Ominous red rashes spread across their faces, indicating scarlet fever. Connie, as they called her, was protected by her mother’s milk, and Georgiana and Emma, the oldest, recovered. But five-year-old Ann, four-year-old Gertrude, and two-year-old Julia did not. They died before Constance was a month old.

  The family that remained would soon flee New Hampshire’s unforgiving winters and the sight of the three tiny headstones in the town cemetery next to the park. Hannah would never speak of the lost girls, but Constance knew that her birth had been overshadowed by their deaths.1 It is little wonder that for the rest of her life she would look over her shoulder, expecting her own or someone else’s end. In their letters, she and her family would often qualify their plans with the phrase “if I live.”

  Hannah was broken by the sight of her girls’ empty beds and discarded playthings. Years later, one of her daughters would explain, “Mother nearly lost her reason. . . . Father often told us children that a ‘something’ went out of her that week, that was lost forever . . . so that we children did not know what Mother had really been except for a beautiful portrait which Father had had painted of her.”2 It shows a young Hannah with a thoughtful, almost dreamy look in her large, almond-shaped eyes. Constance would never know that calm, innocent gaze. She would know, instead, a worried, watchful mother’s eyes.

  Many years later Hannah wrote rather coolly about her breakdown after the three little girls’ deaths. “My health was so much impaired that it was necessary to leave New England before another winter. We broke up housekeeping,” she wrote, using a common expression that conveys something of the devastation she felt. As Clara, the child who came after Constance, would one day write, “I have always thought the use of ‘breaking up’ a home so appropriate—to those who feel that it breaks up also a part of the heart that never heals!”3 This was certainly the case for Hannah, who had not only to pack up her books, silver, mahogany bed, and sewing table, but
also to leave her darling little girls lying in the frozen New Hampshire earth.

  Portrait of Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson, before the deaths of her children.

  (From Voices Out of the Past, vol. 1 of Five Generations (1785–1923))

  This was the start of a pattern. When tragedy struck, when life became too hard, the Woolsons moved on. This response to grief became ingrained in their children, most of all Constance, who would spend the majority of her adult life on the move. The Woolsons’ home in Claremont was only the first of innumerable homes that would be broken up during her lifetime.

  THE WOOLSONS IN CLAREMONT

  That first home was a two-story, white, Greek Revival house that her father, Jarvis (he went by his middle name), had built across the street from his parents’ house. Claremont’s heyday would come and go with the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, the water power of the river was only beginning to be harnessed, and the town’s prospects remained dim. With the financial crisis of 1837, they all but evaporated. Hannah had no regrets about leaving the sleepy town. She detested the bitter winters and the cold New England stoicism, but Jarvis would always miss the hilly landscape of his youth.4

  Constance’s parents had married on April 26, 1830, having met less than two months earlier at the wedding of Hannah’s best friend and cousin, Julia Campbell, and Jarvis’s best friend, Levi Turner, an up-and-coming lawyer. Turner had ties in Washington and spent tens of thousands of dollars each year speculating on western lands. Some of his air of promise must have rubbed off on his friend Jarvis, or perhaps Hannah was simply drawn to his sharp wit and affectionate ways, for Jarvis was not a lawyer, businessman, or speculator. His passion was journalism. A more capricious occupation would have been hard to find.