C
onstance Fenimore Woolson:
Portrait of a Lady Novelist
by Anne Boyd Rioux
Norton. 392 pages, $32.95
IF WRITER Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) is remembered today, it is usually for her close friendship and literary rivalry with Henry James. Both writers had made a pact early in their friendship to burn their correspondence, and much of their relationship remains wreathed in mystery. They “cared deeply” for each other, says Anne Boyd Rioux in this new biography, and it is known from letters that Woolson sent to family and friends that she eventually referred to him as Harry. It’s unknown whether he called her Connie, as her family did.
This consistently fascinating and exceptionally well-written portrayal of Woolson (great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper) should do much to bring her life and work back to light. The question on all of our minds, of course, is: can we include Woolson in the pantheon of same-sex-oriented American writers? The answer is: maybe. Rioux says that it has been suggested that Woolson “may have had homosexual desires,” but that she had not found any “concrete evidence.” But both Lillian Faderman and Terry Castle* have anthologized Woolson’s 1876 short story “Felipa.” Castle called it “a haunting meditation on cross-cultural desire.” Faderman identified it as “the earliest example of female sexual inversion (as opposed to romantic friendship) in nineteenth-century American literature.” Faderman notes that the works of German sexologists Karl Ulrichs and Karl von Westphal had begun to be taken seriously at this time and wondered if Woolson had been familiar with them. Although Rioux does not offer that conjecture, she mentions Woolson’s novels and stories in which schoolgirls had crushes on their female teachers and speculates on her devotion to one of her lifelong friends. One of nine children, five of whom died young, Woolson went deaf as a young woman and was dogged by clinical depression her entire life. Described as a child as “acutely sensitive,” she had an intense personality, “passionate and dramatic.” As an adult, she was remembered as a “most entertaining companion” and was seen as vivacious, able to laugh at herself, and full of irreverent wit. But she felt unattractive, and after her Civil War-era engagement dissolved—her fiancé, Zeph Spalding, accepted a posting as consul to Hawaii; Woolson felt unable to leave her family obligations in Cleveland, and Spalding soon married a much younger woman. She did not pursue marriage for herself, though she regarded it the most appropriate goal for other women. Needing to make a living while helping to care for her family, she began to write stories for magazines when she was about thirty. She was able to make use of family connections to get her foot in the door of New York publishers. She faced the misogyny of publishers and of male writers, as well as distress in her own family. Rioux says that her brother “would express ‘horror’ when his sister published a poem in a magazine promoting women’s rights.” To write for publication meant that a woman was “forsak[ing]femininity and therefore lovability.” Almost forty when she finally attained her goal of getting to Europe, Woolson planned to spend the rest of her life there. She did, but was constantly moving between England and Italy in a ceaseless search for good weather and less costly accommodations. Upon meeting her, Henry James wrote to his aunt that he found her “old-maidish, deaf, and ‘intense’; but a good little woman and a perfect lady.” To his sister Alice (who was in a Boston marriage with Katharine Loring), he wrote that Woolson was “amiable, but deaf” and that she’d been “pursuing [him]through Europe with a letter of introduction.” Woolson eventually became close friends with both Alice and Katharine. The latter appears as the character Maud Muriel Mackintosh, a sculptor, a “happy spinster” who looks forward to women’s suffrage and doesn’t care for the protection of men, in what Rioux calls Woolson’s last and “most modern novel,” Horace Chase (1894). Woolson fell into a downhill spiral—she was deeply depressed, in constant physical pain, able to write only while standing up, beset by serious money worries—and leapt to her death from her room overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. James blamed himself for her death, stated that he was unaware of her illnesses, and was known as her “principal mourner.” With her close reading of Woolson’s novels and short stories, access to a vast trove of letters, interpretation of secondary sources, and descriptions of literary rivalries, all recounted at an unflagging pace, Anne Boyd Rioux has done a great deal toward restoring the place of this American novelist. * Lillian Faderman, Chloe Plus Olive: An Anthology of Lesbian and Bisexual Literature From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, 1994; and Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology From Ariosto to Stonewall, 2003. 
Set in the rural St. Augustine, Florida, area (which Woolson loved to visit), it’s the story of a preteen daughter of “exotic” immigrants from the Spanish island of Minorca. Felipa, always dressed as a boy, falls in with three tourists—a young man and woman, who are courting, and their female friend—and ends up in love with each adult in turn. In a jealous pique, Felipa knifes the young man.
