Author: Sharon L. Dean Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813043573 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 653
Book Description
In recent years Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) has been fictionalized at least three times, perhaps most notably in Colm Tóibín's award-winning work The Master, a novelization of the life of Woolson's close friend Henry James. But Woolson was a literary star in her own right, publishing in the premier magazines of her day. She penned critically acclaimed novels, short stories, and poetry until her mysterious death in Venice at age fifty-three. Sharon Dean has recompiled, dated, and, in many cases, physically reassembled all of Woolson’s extant correspondence from nearly forty sources. Dean's painstaking work presents the fullest picture we have of Woolson and functions as an important corrective to the fictional portrayals. In these letters one finds rich personal detail alongside ruminations on contemporary political and social conditions. A trenchant critic of the customs and mores of her age, Woolson, in her letters, offers a nuanced perspective on life as a woman and as a writer in the nineteenth century.
Author: Constance Fenimore Woolson Publisher: Library of America ISBN: 1598536516 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 710
Book Description
A landmark of literary recovery: the first major edition of an overlooked genius who in her lifetime was considered 19th-century America's greatest woman writer In the eyes of her contemporaries, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) ranked with George Eliot as one of the two greatest women writers of the English language. She wrote fiction of remarkable intellectual power that outsold those of her male contemporaries Henry James and Willian Dean Howells. James enshrined memories of his long, complicated friendship with Woolson in The Beast in the Jungle and The Wings of the Dove, and more recently Colm Tobin treated the relationship in his novel The Master. But Woolson's close association with James, and her likely suicide in Venice, have tended to overshadow her own literary accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a martyr to the male literary establishment. This volume, the most comprehensive gathering of Woolson's stories to date, represents the culmination of decades of recovery work done by scholars, and puts the focus back on the work, where it belongs. Set variously in the Great Lakes region, the post-Civil War South, and Europe, Woolson's short stories often concern outsiders of one kind or another--prophets and misfits living in remote landscapes, uneducated coal miners, impoverished spinsters, neglected nuns, a haunted caretaker of the dead, destitute southerners, and female artists driven to extreme behavior as they seek the admiration or approval of established (male) critics or writers. Woolson's minute realism captures both the social texture of her time and the inner emotional lives of these overlooked and marginalized characters. Most of all her writings startle us with their simmering intensity, their sensual descriptions of the environment, and refusal to smooth out the ambiguities and tensions that inevitably result from human efforts to communicate and connect. Her fiction is deeply human, resonating with a power across the centuries that makes them remarkably modern for today's readers.
Author: Constance Fenimore Woolson Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393352013 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
To celebrate her forthcoming biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne Boyd Rioux has selected the best of this classic writer’s stories. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) was one of the few nineteenth-century women writers considered the equal of her male peers. Harper & Brothers was so enamored of her work that the firm agreed to publish whatever she could write. In this gathering, Rioux has chosen fiction over the course of Woolson’s life, including “In Sloane Street,” never published since it first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. Woolson’s stories travel from the rural Midwest to the deep South and then across the Atlantic to Italy and England. Her strong characters and indelible settings provide continuity throughout this collection as do her concerns with passion, creativity, imagination, and the demands of society. Whether portraying the keeper of a Union soldiers’ cemetery in the defeated South, a woman writer whose genius goes unrecognized, or the ex-pat denizens of Florence, Woolson’s deft characterization and subtlety create a broad landscape of Americans and their ways no matter where they lived.
Author: Anne Boyd Rioux Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393245101 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 432
Book Description
"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 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.
Author: Melissa Croghan Publisher: MSU Press ISBN: 1628954965 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Great Women of Mackinac, 1800–1950 tells the dramatic history of thirteen women leaders on Mackinac Island in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their linked visions of family and community define this beautiful island in the western Great Lakes. In this collective biography, author and Mackinac Island resident Melissa Croghan reveals how central they were to the history and literature of Mackinac. Elizabeth Bertrand Mitchell, Madeline Marcot LaFramboise, Therese Marcot Schindler, Elizabeth Therese Baird, Agatha Biddle, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft were Anishinaabe fur traders, farmers, memoirists, and poets who established the nineteenth-century island community. Among the women of Mackinac, there were also those who sang the island’s praises and recorded the lively relationships of the English, French, and American inhabitants. These writers included Juliette Magill Kinzie, Anna Brownell Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. There were also community builders who founded key institutions and midwifed generations of island children: Rosa Truscott Webb, Daisy Peck Blodgett, and Stella King. Readers interested in American literature, women’s lives, and Mackinac Island’s storied history will find this book a fascinating read.
Author: Henry James Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674387829 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 620
Book Description
The third volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of Henry James's letters finds the novelist settled in Europe and his expatriation complete. The letters of this time reflect the growth of James's literary and personal friendships and introduce the reader to the frescoed palazzos, Palladian villas, and great estates of the Roseberys, the Rothschilds, the Bostonian-Venetian Curtises, and the Florentine-American Boott circle. In all his travels, James closely observes the social scene and the dilemmas of the human beings within it. During this fruitful period he writes The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and some thirty-five of his finest international tales. Undermining his success, however, are a devastating series of disappointments. Financial insecurity, an almost paraniod defensiveness following the utter failure of his dramatic efforts, and the deaths of his sister, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, and his ardent admirer Constance Fenimore Woolson all combine to take him to what he recognizes is the edge of an abyss of personal tragedy. And yet James endures, and throughtout these trials his letters reveal the flourish, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the social insight that marked his genius. As Edel writes in his Introduction: "The grand style is there, the amusement at the vanities of this world, the insistence that the great ones of the earth lack the imagination he is called upon to supply, and then his boundless affection and empathy for those who have shown him warmth and feeling." In an appendix Mr. Edel presents four remarkable unpublished letters from Miss Woolson to James. These throw light on their ambiguous relationship and on James's feelings of guilt and shock after her suicide in Venice.
Author: Etta M. Madden Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438488440 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
Engaging Italy charts the intertwined lives and writings of three American women in Italy in the 1860s and '70s—journalist Anne Hampton Brewster (1818–92), orphanage and industrial school founder Emily Bliss Gould (1825–75), and translator Caroline Crane Marsh (1816–1901). Brewster, Gould, and Marsh did not follow their callings abroad so much as they found them there. The political and religious unrest they encountered during Italian Unification put their utopian visions of expatriate life to the test. It also prompted these women to engage these changes and take up their pens both privately and publicly. Though little-known today, their diaries, letters, poetry, and news accounts help to rewrite the story of American women abroad inherited from figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Both feminist recovery project and collective biography, Engaging Italy contributes to the growing body of scholarship on transatlantic nineteenth-century women writers while focusing particular attention on the shared texts and ties linking Brewster, Gould, and Marsh. Etta M. Madden demonstrates the generative power of literary and social networks during moments of upheaval.
Author: Henry James Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496232380 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 467
Book Description
This sixteenth installment in the complete collection of Henry James's letters records James's ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income.
Author: Henry James Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 0803269854 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Containing letters written between September 2, 1879, and May 14, 1880, this second volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880 documents the full establishment of Henry James as a professional writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic, as James publishes the novel Confidence and the literary biography Hawthorne and begins work on Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady. James also visits Paris, Florence, Rome, and Naples; begins his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson; and deepens his attachment to London and to his friends and acquaintances there.
Author: Sharon L. Dean
Author: Constance Fenimore Woolson
Author: Constance Fenimore Woolson
Author: Anne Boyd Rioux
Author: Melissa Croghan
Author: Henry James
Author: Etta M. Madden
Author: Henry James
Author: Constance Fenimore Woolson
Author: Henry James