Constance Fenimore Woolson

Yes, I know that most people have no idea who Constance Fenimore Woolson is, but she's kind of a big deal in 19th-century women's writing. As I mentioned below, I am hard at work on my paper about her poetry, which I'll present at SSAWW's conference in late October. I've been going through all my research notes and found some great quotations from her worth sharing.

Woolson, who had a difficult life as a woman writing in the nineteenth century, wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman in 1876: "'Why do literary women break down so...It almost seems as though only the unhappy women took to writing. The happiest women I have known have belonged to two classes; the devoted wives and mothers, and the successful flirts, whether married or single; such women never write'" (qtd. in Torsney 19). What a powerfully sad observation--and one often repeated by other women artists. I am reminded of that troubling section in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall where the main character tells her daughter that she prays the child never ends up like her mother--a successful writer. "No happy woman ever writes," she thinks to herself.

Woolson's writing is full of such observations as again and again she acknowledges her own desire to write and be respected yet also notes how this separates her from other women--how it marks her as different. Torsney's Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Aristry covers this idea quite well and it worth a read if you are at all interested in Woolson.

Additionally, she writes again and again about the limitations she feels imposed on her--about what a woman should write about and just how she should handle her subject. For the most part, even if such choices kept down her sales figures, she wrote what she felt she had to, a courageous choice for a woman who was more or less financially dependent on selling her writing. Here's a heck of a passage from another letter: “‘I had rather be strong than beautiful, or even good, provided the good must be dull’” (qtd. in Pattee 132).

But it's not all sadness and gloom in Woolson's letters: check out this gem from a letter to Henry James, her good friend, written in February, 1882, in response to his Portrait of a Lady:

“How did you ever dare write a portrait of a lady? Fancy any woman’s attempting a portrait of a gentleman! Wouldn’t there be a storm of ridicule…For my own part, in my small writings, I never dare put down what men are thinking, but confine myself simply to what they do and say. For, long experience has taught me that whatever I suppose them to be thinking at any especial time, that is sure to be exactly what they are not thinking. What they are thinking, however, nobody but a ghost could know” (qtd. in Torsney 39).

I love this passage because it's both funny and biting, playful and serious, marks of the best kind of humor.

And one more--just because it gives me funny mental images--an excerpt from an 1875 letter: "'I hate Wordsworth. Yes, I really think I hate him. And the reason is because people keep flinging him at your head all the time'" (qtd. in Hubbell 725). Don't tell anyone, but that's kind of how I feel about Wallace Stevens (in part because I don't get him!).

Works Cited

Hubbell, Jay B. “Some New Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson.” The New England Quarterly 14.4 (December 1941): 715-735.

Pattee, Fred L. “Constance Fenimore Woolson and the South.” South Atlantic Quarterly 38 (1939): 130-141.

Torsney, Cheryl B. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.