Constance Fenimore Woolson S Nineteenth Century

"These essays explore topics crucial to understanding the period's literature and suggest new directions for scholarship. Together they constitute a collection that expands the available body of criticism about Woolson and her contemporaries. This book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century women's fiction and travel writing."--Jacket.

Five stories of provincial life in the Great Lakes region by one of nineteenth-century America’s most noteworthy female authors. Constance Fenimore Woolson was renowned in her time for her novels and short stories evoking the regional culture of the Great Lakes. Nearly forgotten by contemporary readers, her work and reputation have enjoyed a significant resurgence in recent years. This collection presents five of her most beloved short stories: “Solomon,” “Wilhelmina,” “St. Clair Flats,” “The Lady of Little Fishing,” and “Macarius the Monk.” Originally published in 1875, this collection showcases Woolson’s insight into the quiet dramas of rural American life in the nineteenth century—animated by thwarted loves, familial tensions, and divisions of race and class—as well as her ear for regional dialect and her concern for nature and the environment.

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.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Anne" (A Novel) by Constance Fenimore Woolson. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

For the Major is a fascinating look at the lives of the Carrolls in the sweet, sleepy town of Far Edgerley. Excerpt: "Madam Carroll of the Farms, upon a certain evening in May 1868, was sitting in her doorway, her eyes fixed upon the dull red line of a road winding down the mountain opposite. This road was red because it ran through red clay; and a hopelessly sticky road it was, too, at most seasons of the year, as the horses of the Tuloa stage line knew to their cost. But the vehicle now coming through the last fringes of the firs was not a stage, and it was drawn..."

"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.

A unique but little-known woman writer offers a powerful voice from the nineteenth-century Great Lakes frontier

Fin-de-siècle fiction by British female aesthetes and American women regionalists stages moments of rebellion when female characters rise up and insist on the right to maintain control of their creations. Cordell asserts that these revolutionary acts constitute a transatlantic conversation about aesthetic practice and creative ownership.