Author author head financial literary regional chief
Her father was a descendant of Thomas Woolson who settled in Cambridge, Massachussets, before 1660; her mother was a niece of James Fenimore Cooper [q. v. ].
As a young girl she accompanied her father on long drives through Ohio and Wisconsin, and on trips to the family cottage at Mackinac Island, and in this way acquired a thorough knowledge of the lake region.
There Constance attended Miss Hayden's School and the Cleveland Seminary.
At eighteen she was graduated from Madame Chegary's School in New York City at the head of her class.
The work of her first five years of authorship, at a time when interest in regional literature had been aroused by the work of Bret Harte, was concerned very largely with her experiences in the lake region.
She contributed stories, poems, and travel sketches to Harper's, the Galaxy, Lippincott's, the Atlantic Monthly, and other leading magazines.
In 1873 she published, under the name of Anne March, a reminiscence of her early life in Cleveland called The Old Stone House.
But the nine tales in the collection Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches (1875) easily constitute the choicest products of these first years.
St. Augustine became the focal point of her writings on the South and the chief rival of Mackinac Island in her affections.
There she wrote for the magazines many stories and sketches of southern life during the reconstruction period, the best of which were reprinted in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880).
Between 1877 and 1879 she wrote a number of able critical articles for the "Contributors' Club" of the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1879 she sailed for Europe, where she spent the remaining fourteen years of her life.
After a visit to Egypt in 1890, she lived in England, principally at Oxford, until the spring of 1893, when she returned to Italy.
She spent the last months of her life in several of the old palaces that line the Grand Canal in Venice.
Her death occurred on Jan. 24, 1894, after a serious illness, and was reported at the time as suicide.
During the sojourn in Europe she published all five of her novels, two collections of short stories, a travel volume, and a considerable number of stories, poems, and sketches that appeared only in American periodicals.
Her first novel, Anne (1883), completed before she left America, is in its best portions a tale of Mackinac Island.
Her shortest and in many respects her best novel, For the Major (1883), is a comparatively unlocalized account of village life in the eastern Appalachians.
Though he suggests a certain weakness in her "predilection for cases of heroic sacrifice" and her "delicate manipulation of the real" for the sake of glamor, James himself offers her praise for her minutely careful observation, her skill in "evoking a local tone" (especially in East Angels) and her "general attitude of watching life, waiting upon it and trying to catch it in the fact" (post).
Her work is frequently overlooked by contemporary American readers, but there is an unobtrusive artistry about many of her novels and short stories, and a desire to present life in certain restricted circles with verisimilitude, that should insure her a lasting audience among the discriminating.
[The date of birth is frequently given wrongly as Mar. 5, 1848.
Short Story (1923); Harper's Weekly, Feb. 3, 10, 1894; N. Y. Times, Jan. 25, 1894 (death notice) and Jan. 26 (denial of suicide). ]
She was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome.
Except for a time during the Civil War when she was in charge of a post office in one of the sanitary fairs, she lived a life of leisure in Cleveland until 1869, the year of her father's death.
During the early seventies, with her mother and widowed sister, she traveled extensively up and down the Atlantic seaboard between Cooperstown, N. Y. , and St. Augustine, Fla.
From 1873 until the death of her mother in 1879 she lived chiefly in the Carolinas and in Florida.
Soon after Constance's birth the Woolsons removed from Claremont to Cleveland, Ohio, where the father established himself successfully in business.
sources are three books by Constance Woolson's niece, Clare Benedict: Voices out of the Past (1929), from which the date of birth is deduced (p. 164), Constance Fenimore Woolson (1930), and The Benedicts Abroad (1930), all privately printed See also J. D. Kern, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1934), with bibliog.; Henry James, Partial Portraits (1888); F. L. Pattee, The Development of the Am.
The posthumous collections of European stories, The Front Yard (1895) and Dorothy (1896), are accounts of Americans projected, in the manner of her friend Henry James q.v., against the background of an older civilization.
