Constance Fenimore Woolson

Constance Fenimore Woolson was an American writer whose novels, poetry, and short fiction explored the wide-ranging nineteenth-century landscapes in which she lived. Born in 1840 in Claremont, New Hampshire, Woolson’s family soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after the deaths of three of her sisters from scarlet fever. Woolson attended the Cleveland Female Seminary before completing her education at a New York boarding school. She traveled across the midwest and northeast throughout her childhood and early adulthood, encountering a range of regional landscapes and local cultures. Following the death of her father in 1869, Woolson began to publish her writings in periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. From 1873 to 1879 she spent the winter months alongside her mother in St. Augustine, Florida, and traveled throughout the post–Civil War south. After the death of her mother in 1879, Woolson moved abroad, spending time in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Woolson died in Venice on January 24, 1894, after leaping or falling from her third story bedroom window.

“She had horror of daintiness. In her prose, she aspired to a style muscular enough to impress itself on a reader, flexible enough to turn on a dime from domestic scenes to shipwrecks or chase sequences, and sturdy enough to bear transplanting to different settings and situations.”–The New Republic

“She is interested in secret histories, in the ‘inner life of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried,’ emphasizing the interior lives of her characters rather than calling attention to her startling depictions of the larger landscape and cultural contradictions.” – Henry James (quoted in the Los Angeles Review of Books)