Miss Grief and Other Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  …

  Foreword by COLM TÓIBÍN

  Introduction by ANNE BOYD RIOUX

  St. Clair Flats

  Solomon

  Rodman the Keeper

  Sister St. Luke

  “Miss Grief”

  A Florentine Experiment

  In Sloane Street

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  by Colm Tóibín

  THE HOUSE KNOWN AS VILLA BRICHIERI-COLOMBI, WHICH the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson began to rent in 1887, still stands on the hill of Bellosguardo, overlooking Florence with a commanding view of the city and the Arno valley. The gardens are still surrounded by high walls, offering the house the sort of privacy that Woolson considered necessary for her happiness. Woolson wrote to a friend to say that her new accommodation was “an immense success in every way. … The situation is unrivalled. …Everywhere, when I raise my eyes from either drawing room (there are two), dining-room, bedroom, dressing-room or writing-room, I see the most enchanting landscape spread out before me; mountains, hills, river, city, villages, old castles, towns, campaniles, olive groves, almond trees and all the thousand divine ‘bits’ that make up Italian scenery.”1

  While Woolson was an inveterate traveler, having wandered a great deal in the American South, in the Orient, in England, Germany, and Switzerland, Italy seems to have been the place that fascinated her most. To another correspondent she noted that, fifty years before her first visit, her granduncle James Fenimore Cooper had also been in Florence with his family. “They remained ten months,” she wrote, “living first in an old palace in the city, and then in a Villa outside of the walls. …We have been much interested in finding at a library here a book of Uncle Fenimore’s which we had never seen—Excursions in Italy. It was published in Paris in 1838, and gives an account of their Italian journeyings.”2

  Farther up the hill of Bellosguardo lie two buildings facing each other that are rich in literary history. On the left-hand side of a small dusty square is Villa Montanto, with its battlemented watchtower. This is where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a draft of The Marble Faun. (“Hawthorne wrote the Marble Faun there one summer, you know,” Woolson wrote to her cousin. “Perhaps one could catch a breath of his spirit.”3) Opposite is Villa Castellani, in one of whose apartments lived the Bostonian Francis Boott with his daughter, Lizzie. Henry James, who knew the Bootts well, used their apartment and indeed aspects of their personalities and their relationship with each other in the creation of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter, Pansy, in The Portrait of a Lady and later in the making of Adam Verver and his daughter, Maggie, in The Golden Bowl.

  Constance Fenimore Woolson met Henry James first in 1880, when he was in Florence writing the early sections of The Portrait of a Lady. She wrote to a friend that despite his busy schedule, “he found time to come in the mornings and take me out; sometimes to the galleries or churches, and sometimes just for a walk in the beautiful green Cascine.”4

  Woolson drew on these encounters for her story “A Florentine Experiment,” just as James used them, perhaps more obliquely, in the scenes in The Portrait of a Lady depicting Osmond and Isabel after their betrothal. Over the next seven years, Woolson and James met in Switzerland and in England. They had much in common. They were both solitary souls who sometimes needed society—James more than Woolson—but they both also dreaded too much company and all forms of intrusion. They both paid great care and attention to their work. Woolson wrote to a friend: “I don’t suppose any of you realize the amount of time and thought I give to each page of my novels; every character, every word of speech, and of description is thought of, literally, for years before it is written out for the final time. …It takes such possession of me that when, at last, a book is done, I am pretty nearly done myself.”5

  On August 30, 1893, she wrote from Venice, describing her daily schedule: “I am now called at 4.30 every morning, and then, after a cup of tea, I sit (in a dressing gown) and write until 9.30, when I have breakfast. This is to get the cool hours for work. Then I dress and go on writing until 4 p.m., when I go to the Lido and take a sea-bath.”6

  In 1887, Woolson returned to Florence, wishing to rent an apartment or house on Bellosguardo. She found the Villa Brichieri-Colombi and, before she moved in, invited Henry James to sublease the villa while she was staying in an apartment in the nearby Villa Castellani. The two writers saw each other every day. When James, having moved to Venice, let her know that he was unhappy in the watery city, she invited him to live in rooms on the ground floor of her newly rented villa. On April 24, 1887, James wrote to Edmund Gosse from Villa Brichieri-Colombi: “I sit here making love to Italy. At this divine moment she is perfectly irresistible, & this delicious little Florence is not the least sovereign of her charms. I am fixed, till June 1st, in a villa which in England would be suburban, but here is supercelestial, whence the most beautiful view on earth hangs before me whenever I lift my head.”7

  James was writing The Aspern Papers. It was, one imagines, not lost on him, and on Woolson when she came to read the story, that it concerned the legacy of a famous American writer whose first name was Jeffrey (with echoes of James Fenimore Cooper’s first two initials), and that it concerned a man in search of shelter, a man who had devoted his life to literary matters who was now in Italy. It also dealt with two spinsters living in a large house, and their gnarled relationship with the visitor.

  In 1880, Woolson had published one of her most heartbreaking and dramatic stories, “‘Miss Grief,’” about a woman in Italy who is living in great poverty with her aunt. The woman approaches a younger writer with samples of her work. “‘Miss Grief,’” dealing as it does with two unmarried literary foreigners in Italy, has interesting echoes in The Aspern Papers.

  In a preface written for the New York edition of his work, however, James claimed that the roots of The Aspern Papers were in a story he heard about the life of Clare Claremont, Shelley’s sister-in-law and mistress of Byron, in Florence when she was old and forgotten and in possession of invaluable literary papers. But the inspiration for the story, to some extent, was also in James’s own circumstances as the guest of Constance Fenimore Woolson while the story was being composed and, indeed, as a reader of her story “‘Miss Grief.’”

  While James’s knowledge of the United States was severely limited, Constance Fenimore Woolson could write about states of mind and states of the Union that were beyond James’s reach. Just as years later Edith Wharton would make James envious of her intimate knowledge of old New York society, Woolson made clear to him that many parts of his own country, which she knew well and described in stories such as “St. Clair Flats,” “Solomon,” “Rodman the Keeper,” and “Sister St. Luke,” were closed to him.

  Woolson’s letters from Europe are filled with wonder and with vivid description; her earlier letters from the American wilderness are equally vivid as they take pleasure in describing danger, or memories of danger. In one letter she writes in reply to a description of fierce cold: “The cold mentioned made me shudder. It made me ‘creep’ a great deal more than ever the moccasins did in Florida. I wo’nt [sic] say that I am fond of snakes; but I like to look at them from a safe distance. I used to row up the creeks, especially to find them.”8 In another letter, written from Florida, she described her exotic life in the wilderness: “[O]n other days I take a row boat and go prowling down the inlet into all sorts of creeks that go no one knows where; I wind through dense forest where the trees meet overhead, and the long grey moss brushes my solitary boat as I pass. I go far up the Sebastian River as utterly alone as Robinson Crusoe. I meet alligators, porpoises, pelicans, cranes, and even d
eer, but not a human soul.”9

  Woolson could become familiar, then, with creatures from the wild and prowl among them and also associate on equal terms with Henry James in London, Geneva, Florence, and Rome. She could re-create the atmosphere of the solitary places in a story as full of atmosphere as “St. Clair Flats,” in which she writes about light and water with the same sonorousness and clarity as Joseph Conrad. She could write about the legacy of history in “Rodman the Keeper,” in which the bitterness and destruction arising from the Civil War are dramatized. In her stories about artists, she could include the figure of Solomon in the story of that name, a failed artist living in poverty in the coal country of Ohio.

  What these stories have in common with the work of Henry James is their refusal to offer the reader a happy ending, or an easy sense of redemption. Also, Woolson tended to narrate her story through the eyes or the voice of one single protagonist, thus achieving a sort of intensity as the story proceeds.

  As well as being an intrepid traveler, Woolson became an adventurous and brave explorer in the territory of human disappointment. None of her characters is allowed to prevail. If there is an artist, as in “Solomon” and “‘Miss Grief,’” then the art will go unrecognized; if there is an evocative landscape, then it will spell death and decay. And if there is travel and adventure, it will lead to misfortune or an ambiguous solution.

  Woolson is at her most brilliant and her most complex when she writes about disappointment in love, as she does in “A Florentine Experiment” and “In Sloane Street,” two stories about Americans in Europe. Both stories deal with a triangle that in less subtle hands could be called a love triangle, but in Woolson’s stories is presented as stranger and more interesting and dynamic.

  In the first of these two stories, set in Florence, Mrs. Lovell, who has lost her husband, is being pursued by Trafford Morgan, a desultory American. When it becomes clear that Morgan cannot or will not win her, the intelligent and self-effacing Margaret Stowe, who lives with her aunt, begins to move in his orbit. They may or may not love each other, and what is questioned in this most nuanced drama is the contingent nature of love itself. Woolson is clever enough to allow the story to become mysterious and open-ended and the theme to be filled with shade.

  In her book A Private Life of Henry James, Lyndall Gordon ponders the relationship between the character of Margaret Stowe in this story and her creator. “Woolson draws an obvious self-portrait in her heroine,” she writes.10 Trafford Morgan, who is the same age as Henry James when Woolson got to know him, is an expatriate wanderer, diffident, hard to pin down. Margaret and he walk in the Cascine, where Woolson and James also walked (and where Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond walked). What is remarkable about the story is how elusive and filled with misdirection their relationship is, how oddly they circle each other, as though the author realized that the age of romance for serious novelists had come to an end. The story is bathed in the sort of irony and brittle wisdom that was, a generation later, to be found in the work of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen.

  “In Sloane Street,” written in 1892, eighteen months before Woolson’s death, takes this idea of a triangle of two women and a man a step further. Philip Moore, a novelist, and his wife, who whines, are traveling with their two children and an old friend, Gertrude Remington, who, in Lyndall Gordon’s words, “reads deep books, wears tailor-made gowns, and pins back her hair plainly.”11

  What is most notable about the story is its dry command. The dialogue hovers between making the speakers seem ghastly and suggesting that they are in deep pain. Every moment of the story increases the tension. The narrative line moves underneath the action until slowly it surfaces as the story of Miss Remington’s isolation. We watch her feeling slighted by Moore’s remarks about women writers. But, more important, as the Moores unite, emerging as a married couple, Miss Remington’s status as a single woman makes her seem vulnerable, utterly alone. It is Constance Fenimore Woolson’s great gift that this is done without any obvious effort or display, but with much subtlety, controlled sympathy, and writerly skill.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Anne Boyd Rioux

  DURING HER LIFETIME, THE WORDS MOST COMMONLY used to describe the writings of Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) were: “original,” “powerful,” “vigorous,” “artistic,” “sympathetic,” “true,” and “real.” She wrote five novels for adults and dozens of stories and was often compared with Henry James and George Eliot. The leading magazine and book publisher Harper & Brothers sought and received an exclusive contract with her. Her work was considered by many to be superior to that of any living American woman writer, and some believed she deserved the title of America’s “novelist laureate.” Henry James paid tribute to her in his collection Partial Portraits (1888), discovering in her stories about the Reconstruction-era South “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” In her landmark essay, “Woman in American Literature” (1890), Helen Gray Cone summed up Woolson’s reputation: “Few American writers of fiction have given evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature—these seem fitting words [to describe her]. Women have reason for pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.”1

  When Woolson died in 1894, at the age of fifty-three, after falling from her third-story window in Venice, her friend and editor Henry Mills Alden called her “a true artist” whose writings possessed a “rare excellence, originality, and strength [that] were appreciated by the most fastidious critics.” In the New York Tribune, the influential poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, comparing her with Jane Austen and the Brontës, called her “one of the leading women in the American literature of the century.” Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and collaborator with Mark Twain, declared her “one of the first in America to bring the short story to its present excellence,” and wrote that her death was “deplored by the entire literary fraternity of this country.”2

  Nonetheless, Woolson’s stellar reputation faded quickly. Already in 1906, a reader wrote to The New York Times, “Miss Woolson has done too much for America and Americans to be forgotten and ignored.” A tribute to her written by the Irish novelist Shan F. Bullock in 1920 suggests the particular value she had to those few who remembered her: “I venture to say that no writer living compares in power and art with Constance Woolson. …Had she lived, it is possible that in time she would have forced acknowledgment from a public that refuses even common notoriety to anything save commercial success. …But Miss Woolson, it seems, is forgotten. No one remembers her name, even.”3

  At the height of her career, Woolson had managed that difficult combination of critical and commercial success. Yet none of her novels was as successful as her first, Anne (1882), which sold 57,000 copies, nearly ten times as many as Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, published a few months earlier. Some critics, most influentially William Dean Howells, had criticized her portraits of women, charging her with a lack of realism and/or morality, and had objected to the difficult themes of her later work, which tackled such subjects as domestic abuse and love outside of marriage. Still, these cannot explain the precipitous decline of her reputation. The growing suspicion in the modern era of expressions of genuine emotion quickly dated her work, which did not shy away from the portrayal of restrained passion and eruptions of powerful emotions, even though these were never the dominant themes of her work. Of even greater influence was the tendency by male critics to classify all women writers as minor as the American literary canon took shape at the turn of the century.4 Throughout the twentieth century, the narrative of separate literary spheres for men and women persisted, creating a neat split between the major male realists (such as James and Howells) and the minor female regionalists (such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wi
lkins Freeman). Woolson’s work, which participated in both movements and crossed the gendered divides of her own day, fell through the cracks of the dominant narrative of American literary history.

  Nonetheless, Woolson’s name was kept alive by a small cadre of appreciative critics from the 1920s through the 1960s, when Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel discovered that she was a significant figure in the famous author’s life and made her name once again more widely known.5 Yet Edel had dragged Woolson out of the shadows only to belittle her as a second-rate writer who had tried to ride the Master’s coattails. Feminist scholars, many of whom discovered Woolson through their research on James, helped to repair the damage by confirming the artistic and cultural value of her work and examining her pathbreaking life.6 Yet her friendship with James continues to overshadow her own significance as a writer, and the fact that her life ended in probable suicide has eclipsed her earlier accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a tragic victim of the male literary world’s (and her friend James’s) neglect.

  Another disadvantage for Woolson’s reputation has been the fact that she cannot be aligned with one particular region, such as Jewett’s Maine or Kate Chopin’s Louisiana. Woolson traveled widely, and her writings reflect the breadth of her experience and vision. Her earliest stories were set in the Great Lakes region, near where she grew up, in Cleveland. After 1873, she set many of her stories in the Reconstruction-era South, particularly Florida, where she spent the winters with her invalid mother. After moving to Europe in late 1879, Woolson continued to set her novels in America but also wrote stories about American expatriates in Italy, Switzerland, and England. As a result, she was a pioneering regionalist without a region to call her own.

  Coming of age as a writer at the same time as American literary realism, Woolson also made important contributions to that movement that have been greatly overlooked. She always insisted that her writings were taken directly from life as she observed it, which for her included characters’ hidden emotional lives, in addition to their inner consciousness or their social interactions, the usual terrain of most male realists. In his remembrance of her, Warner perfectly captured the essence of her achievement when he wrote, “She was a sympathetic [and] refined observer, entering sufficiently into the analytic mode of the time, but she had the courage to deal with the passions, and life as it is.”7