Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson's dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family's ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father's death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward. Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother's death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton's work of the next generation. In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson's character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.

About the Author :
Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, and the editor of Woolson’s Miss Grief and Other Stories. Rioux has received two National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, one for public scholarship, and lives in New Orleans.

Review :
"Anne Boyd Rioux's new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson is a riveting portrait of a lady whose literary reputation has been undeservedly eclipsed until quite recently. A best-selling nineteenth-century American novelist, friend of countless intellectuals (including Henry James and others in his circle), and intrepid traveler, the stubbornly independent Woolson was compared in her day to the Brontes, Jane Austen, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and James himself produced a critical study of her work. Yet after her death she was sadly forgotten. Now Rioux brings her vividly back to life in a book that is both perceptive and poignant." -- Sandra Gilbert, coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women "In this eloquent and deeply researched biography, Anne Boyd Rioux draws the portrait of a nineteenth-century 'lady novelist' who challenged the era's trivialization of women writers and bias against female literary ambition. Bursting out of the Jamesian frame, Constance Fenimore Woolson comes alive as an artist and a woman." -- Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx "Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" -- Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism "I'm so glad Anne Rioux has brought Constance Fenimore Woolson to our attention. This is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings to light a wonderful nineteenth-century writer-sophisticated, eloquent, and powerful-who should be much more widely known. I hope this book will make that happen." -- Roxana Robinson, author of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life "A fine work of scholarship and biographical narrative. Rioux has researched her topic exhaustively and written a compelling narrative. Her work should do much to bring attention again to Woolson's undeservedly neglected life, career, and writings and to establish an accurate assessment of Woolson's relationship with Henry James." -- Pierre Walker, coeditor of The Complete Letters of Henry James "Anne Boyd Rioux tells her compelling story of Constance Fenimore Woolson with force and power, the very qualities once ascribed to Woolson's own fiction. This is a beautifully researched biography of a talented American writer with a lively intellect and ambitious heart, a woman nonetheless inexorably caught in the crosshairs of nineteenth-century womanhood. The denouement, though not entirely a surprise, is devastating." -- Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life