It wasn’t easy for Constance to push her friend down the aisle. “You have been the best friend I ever had,” she wrote to Arabella, but “I have felt such a conviction that you would some day lose your interest in me, . . . that I thought best to prepare for the worst.” Convinced that her own feelings would never change, she feared that “Mrs. Washburn” would not be the “same friend that ‘Belle’ has been for so many years.” After Arabella married Rev. Washburn and went to Europe on her honeymoon, the two friends remained close for a while. Their paths would diverge widely, though, and twenty years later Constance would complain that Arabella never wrote to her anymore.39
As her friends were preparing for their new lives, Constance was forced to face the circumstances that would determine her future as well. Her father’s health had been poor for some time due to worries about his business. Then came the shocking death of his partner Lawson Carter, Arabella’s brother and the “Carter” in the Woolson, Hitchcock, & Carter stove foundry. On March 31, 1869, Lawson walked into Jarvis’s office, asked him to witness his new will, and then went into his own office and shot himself through the heart. Newspaper accounts indicate he had been suffering “severe mental depression, at times approaching mania.” He had claimed many times he was “insane.”40 His erratic behavior preceding his death would have been a constant concern for the entire Woolson family, who were close to Lawson, his wife, Jane, and their five children. Constance, in fact, was godmother to their new baby. After Lawson’s death, Jane moved to Cooperstown to be near her father, the Woolsons’ old friend William Averell, yet Constance’s attachment to Jane and her children would never wane.
The summer after Lawson’s suicide, Constance’s father suffered a severe bout of erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection. When he was able to sit up in bed and appeared to be improving, he sent Constance off to Mackinac Island on July 28 for a break from the cares at home. Her absence left him feeling depressed, but he had wanted her to go for her own sake. She had gone alone, a sign of both her loneliness and her growing independence. It was unusual for a woman to travel solo, but Mackinac felt like her second home. Old friends welcomed her, and she wandered through the aisles of cedar on the hill above town and among the spruce and juniper that covered the rest of the island. She remembered the summers she had spent there with her family and the Spaldings. Every path and rock felt haunted with old associations.41
She had only been on the island for a few days, however, when a telegram arrived. Her father had suddenly fallen ill on the fifth of August. There was evidence of typhoid fever, and he was sinking rapidly. Constance caught the first steamer back to Cleveland but did not arrive until midnight on the ninth. Once she reached home, she found the doorbell shrouded in crepe to muffle the bell, and she knew that her father was dead. In fact he had died three days earlier.42 Neither Connie nor Clara was at his side.
Constance never got over the shock of his death and never forgave herself for not being there to hear his final words and ease his passing. When her nephew, Sam, experienced his own father’s death many years later, she wrote to him, “I am thankful for your sakes that you were all with him during the last hours. You are spared the eternal regret that comes, when it has been otherwise. There is something extremely solemn, I think, in the death of a father, or mother; the children are touched to the inmost heart, & it is a moment like no other; face to face we then stand—with the great mystery.”43
The death of her father left Constance without her anchor. Sixteen years later she wrote, “I have never recovered from the sense of desolation I felt when I lost my father; the world has never been the same to me since, for he made a pet of me.” In her fiction, she often portrayed young women who are deeply dependent on their fathers’ love and care, much more so than on their mothers, who are often already dead. In one scene where a young woman grieves over her father’s dementia, Constance expressed her own feelings about losing her father: “His help, his comprehension, his dear affection and interest had made up all her life, and she did not know how to go on without them, how to live. Never again could she . . . have the exquisite happiness of his perfect sympathy—for he had always understood her, and no one else had. . . . She had cared only for him, she had found all her companionship in him; and now she was left alone.”44
In many ways, Jarvis Woolson was the love of Constance’s life. No man would ever measure up to the perfection of his affection for her. Now, at twenty-nine, she had to learn to live without his devoted love as well as his guidance and protection. His passing left her face-to-face not only with the mystery of death but also with the great question of how her life would go on without him.
PART TWO
An Education
in Authorship
1870–1879
“I am just like a prisoner let loose.”
—CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
“[A]t this late hour I have gotten hold of the pen, and now people must listen to me, occasionally.”
—CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
4
False Starts
SOMETIME IN the months after Jarvis Woolson’s death, Constance walked beneath the overhanging elms along Euclid Avenue on her way downtown to the Herald newspaper offices on Bank Street. A portfolio was tucked under her arm. Inside were a historical essay on Mackinac Island, a reminiscence about a visit to Zoar, and a short story about a doomed Indian summer romance at a Zoar-like retreat. Each of these pieces contained a little bit of her father and the trips they took together. On every page were oblique tributes to him, evidence of the gifts he had given her over the years: a historian’s reverence for the past, a romantic’s adoration of nature unspoiled, and a realist’s regard for “strong wood-cuts” over “nondescript scenery.”1 She would show the portfolio to the group of men waiting for her in the Herald offices, and they would decide if she could make of herself a writer.
Until now she had shared her writings with only a few carefully chosen friends. They had urged her to exercise her literary talent and even convinced her to allow the Herald to publish, anonymously, some of the letters she had written to them while on her summer excursions. But she was alarmed at the idea of seeing her name in print. Fear of failure and of publicity had held her back. Her shyness and low opinion of herself had combined with the lingering feeling that a woman should not dare that way. According to one of Connie’s cousins, her father had encouraged her writing while he was still alive, and she deeply regretted that he did not live to see her begin her career. However, without his death and the loss of his income, it is questionable whether she would ever have braved public exposure. In fact, it may have been a fear of disappointing him, should she fail, that prevented her from pursuing publication. Now her friends, including her brother-in-law and his father, part owners of the Herald and executors of her father’s estate, told her she essentially had no choice. She had to overcome her squeamishness about appearing in print for her own and her mother’s sake.2
A SERIOUS QUESTION
After Jarvis’s death, all his heirs could do was sell his business and some of the land on which the stove foundry was situated for $12,000. There were also the Wisconsin lands, which would continue to earn modestly for many years. But there must also have been debts, for the end result was that Constance and Hannah no longer had enough money to live without constant anxiety. Constance bore the full weight of their financial worries. Charlie had barely left the nest and wasn’t making much money. Clara and her husband could help some, but they were not wealthy. The Mathers were, however, and they offered assistance, but Constance would not accept it. At the age of twenty-nine, she was determined to stand on her own.3
Thus Constance joined the army of so-called surplus women, who had since the war outnumbered men in many states and had to support themselves. According to an article in Harper’s magazine, how single women could support themselves had become “a most serious question to society.” The typically female occupations of governess, teacher, and
seamstress were overcrowded. Constance was certainly well trained for teaching, and her old teacher Linda Guilford, now principal of the Cleveland Academy, would surely have hired her. However, female teachers earned on average only $659 a year, and the uniformly overworked and underpaid schoolteachers in Woolson’s fiction suggest she had little appetite for the profession.4
Writing was much more appealing, but also more uncertain. It could be done at home, and the magazines were filled with the names of women who seemed to have made their fortunes—or at least a decent living—at it. However, as the Harper’s article also pointed out, most who attempted it failed to earn any support at all. Indeed, the literary and journalistic fields had been so glutted with aspiring female writers that the editor of Harper’s in 1867, replying to someone signing herself “A Weak-Minded Woman,” had warned the multitudes of women longing to see their names in print to put down their pens. Constance was an avid reader of literary periodicals, including Harper’s, and very likely read this column, as well as the response from “Another Weak-Minded Woman,” who claimed to have been seized by the “furore scribendi” to disastrous results, including the neglect of her family. This erstwhile aspirant now took it upon herself to “warn others how straight is the gate and narrow is the way to authorship, and how few there be that find it.” She counseled, “Bury pen and paper at once. . . . That way lies madness.” The successful writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had just published her runaway bestseller The Gates Ajar, was hardly more encouraging in her contribution to the discussion, titled “What Shall They Do?” She was grieved “to see in what crowds the women, married and unmarried, flock to the gates of authorship” to be “turn[ed] away in great sad groups, shut out.”5
In spite of the miserable chances for a young woman from Cleveland, Ohio, to make a name for herself as a writer, it seemed like Constance’s best chance. One reason why was the men waiting for her at the Herald offices on Bank Street: family friend George A. Benedict, part owner of the newspaper, and his son and partner, George S. Benedict, Clara’s husband. Also in attendance was John H. A. Bone, who ran the literary department of the paper and was an experienced author, having published in the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. The men looked over her portfolio and gave her their verdict: they decided she should make a go of it. Bone knew many of the literary men she would need to approach, including the Harpers, who published a monthly and two weekly magazines, and Oliver Bunce, an editor at Appletons’ Journal. Bone would write her letters of introduction to each of them. The “weak-minded” women yearning to become authors would have given their eyeteeth for such connections.6
Another auspicious circumstance that made Woolson’s entrance into the literary world a fait accompli was her middle name. “Fenimore,” the name Constance shared with America’s first famous novelist, was a marketable commodity, and Bone was eager to capitalize on it. He used her full name in his letters of introduction and suggested that when she talked with prospective editors she mention being a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper. She was unsure of the propriety of leaning on her Cooper connection and was casting about for a pseudonym. Bone was adamant, however, and she was outnumbered; the three men who held her future in their hands convinced her to brave full exposure. There would be no turning back.7
George S. Benedict was soon on his way to New York on business. He brought Constance with him, armed with her portfolio and Bone’s letters of introduction. They first visited the Harper & Brothers office on Franklin Square. As she sat in the dusty, cigar-ash-covered office of the editor, Henry Mills Alden, noticing the shelves teeming with stacks of unpublished manuscripts, her heart was in her throat. Although Alden had turned away many a novice author, Constance fared better than she could have hoped. The name “Fenimore” drew his attention, and he was impressed to learn of her connection to the author of The Last of the Mohicans. He said he and his colleagues would look at her stories and asked her to return the next day for their decision. When she came back, not only did they want the stories she had given Alden, but they also wanted her to send them everything she wrote. She gratefully agreed. During that first trip to New York, she also met with Bunce at Appletons’, who was disappointed the Harpers had gotten her first. He asked her to send him whatever she felt free to submit elsewhere.8
From the beginning, she produced more than Harper’s could publish. Woolson’s first two signed publications appeared in July 1870: “The Happy Valley,” about Zoar, in Harper’s, and “The Fairy Island,” about Mackinac, in Putnam’s, a New York magazine to which her great-uncle and her cousin, George Pomeroy Keese, had contributed in the 1850s. Not exactly travel essays, these were whimsical tributes to her two favorite places, both still hidden away from the bustle of the modern world. For the rest of her career she would write about such places, often having to exaggerate their remoteness as the civilized world encroached on them. Four months later, her first short story, “An October Idyl,” appeared in Harper’s. It was oddly unconventional in its portrayal of an illicit flirtation that could not be consummated. Set in a remote Zoar-like village during an Indian summer, the story was the first of many in which Woolson would portray lovers who have found each other beyond the boundaries of an oppressive social world but must resign themselves to lives of duty, “returning to [their] stations in the hard world.” After the story’s publication, Arabella sent her some criticism, to which Constance responded defensively: “ ‘The October Idyll’ was wordy, but I am only feeling my way, now. I shall do better in time, but I never cease to wonder at my success. If you think it is easy to advance, even so short a distance as I have, just try it.”9
Just as she was launching her career, she and her mother spent the summer in Cooperstown, giving Constance an opportunity to reflect on what she had inherited with her famous middle name. Although her first pieces had appeared under “C. F. Woolson” and “Constance F. Woolson,” she soon changed her mind about suppressing the “Fenimore” and even decided to adopt the pseudonym “Constance Fenimore” for a tribute to Cooperstown and her uncle in Harper’s titled “A Haunted Lake.” In the essay she described how “memories of the past” lingered over Otsego Lake and the wild, wooded hills around it. She felt more than a little haunted by the legacy Cooper had left behind: “The air is filled with an unseen presence, and a spirit moves upon the face of the deep. A master mind has hallowed the scene; and as we linger on the pebbly beach the echoes seem to repeat his name over our heads and the waters to murmur at our feet.” Although she was drawn to the pioneers and wild frontiers Cooper had so famously portrayed, she was not sure such a heritage was accessible to her as a woman who had grown up in a domesticated Midwest transformed into an industrial center. Nonetheless, she found a model for herself in the kind of writer he had been: “Those authors who write from within, and coin their own brains into words, may go dreamily through the world, their eyes fixed upon vacancy, . . . but the man who takes mankind for his subject, the man who writes to benefit and interest his race, is quick-witted and sharp-sighted, drawing upon his own observations of every-day life.” However romantic a writer Cooper may seem to us today, to Woolson he provided a model of the writer interested in keenly observing the “literal truth.” In him she found a form of realism that was “far more fascinating . . . than the wildest flights of fancy.”10
Just as this piece was published, however, Constance had second thoughts about riding on her great-uncle’s coattails, deciding to retract her use of “Constance Fenimore” in favor of her “true signature.”11 Yet she still couldn’t decide what that should be. In the coming years, she would continue to vacillate between Constance F. Woolson and her full name.
LET LOOSE
Most women writers in the nineteenth century wrote from the vantage point of their homes. Woolson was different. Having trained her eye, as her father had encouraged her, to look out at the world, the impulse to write drove her away from home. Living in Cleveland, she would never amount to much, she believed. She need
ed a wider field to make her observations of life worth recording. As a single woman, however, her options for roaming were few.
Her brother, Charlie, now nearly twenty-four, was in an entirely different situation. The world lay spread out before him like a smorgasbord. He had only to choose his destination. When he came for a visit to Cooperstown that summer of 1870, he announced that he had been given a position at A. T. Stewart’s, one of the largest department stores in the heart of Manhattan’s fashionable shopping district. Here was Connie’s chance; she could follow her younger brother out into the world. It was decided that as winter approached Hannah would return to Cleveland to live with Clara and George, and Constance would follow Charlie to New York.12 While he was going there to become a clerk and start his upward climb (as Zeph had done many years before), her prospects were less certain. Moving to New York was simultaneously a step away from her identity as a daughter and a step toward a new identity as a writer that she barely knew how to imagine.
The plan was for Constance to write letters about New York for publication in the Herald back in Cleveland. Newspaper writing has always been an important source of income and training for American writers. Woolson’s foray into that field would be short, but it was instrumental in helping her develop the critical eye and authoritative voice that would serve her well in her later work. Travel letters were a popular feature in American newspapers throughout the nineteenth century, and many of them were written by women. But it was the opinion columnist—the first was Fanny Fern in the 1850s—who would initiate a new tone for women journalists. During the postwar period witty, sometimes caustic, writers such as Gail Hamilton and Kate Field set the standard. Constance likely knew Field’s work, as it often appeared in the New York Tribune. Field was the consummate modern woman, roaming widely and living by her pen. Henry James would use her in The Portrait of a Lady as the basis for his intrepid female reporter, Henrietta Stackpole, who “smell[s] of the Future—it almost knocks one down!”13
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