Constance would try on a similar literary persona, publishing at least five letters in the Herald under headings such as “Gotham. What a Woman Sees and Says,” and “Gotham. A Bit of Bright Womanly Gossip.” They are long, witty, sometimes chatty, and invariably opinionated. Hiding behind the anonymity of “Our Special Correspondent,” she could poke fun at the men’s “Manhattan uniform”—incomplete without a “variously shaded brown appendage curving over the upper lip and ferociously waxed at the end”—or marvel at the abundance of fur on the ladies—one “immediately withdraws all he has ever said against our new acquisition, Alaska, where every four-legged animal in the land must have been sacrificed last summer to supply the demand for ‘Alaska Sable’ now raging in the metropolis.” At the venerable St. Paul’s, she found fodder for her pen in a name on one of the old memorial tablets: “ ‘Rip Van Dam!’ Did anyone ever hear of a more astonishing title? It is of no use to tell that he was a staid, dignified burgher of pious and portly presence. His name is against it, and we will not believe it. No one but a regular rip-and-tear sort of fellow, a very dare-devil, a roistering, rollicking chap, would ever have borne such a name as those three significant mono-syllables, ‘Rip Van Dam!’ ”14
Constance found her subjects primarily in the posh part of the city. Her boardinghouse at Broadway and Thirty-Second Street, where Charlie probably also lived, was only a block away from Fifth Avenue and around the corner from the mansions of the Astors, Stewarts, and other upper-crust New Yorkers. Flora Payne Whitney was living comfortably in the new brownstone her father had built for her and her new husband at 74 Park Avenue, three blocks away, where they were rapidly climbing their way up into Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. Constance was never comfortable around such wealth or ostentation. Walking along Broadway or Fifth Avenue, noting the diamonds, the elaborately braided hair, and long, close-fitting gloves, Constance knew she could never “deceive the cool eye of a city lady who reads you like a book, stamps you as countrified and lets you go.”15
The real New York she had come to see was to be found in its cultural offerings, reviews of which filled her Herald letters. Free of responsibilities for others and free of provincial Cleveland, she was now able to immerse herself in the finest art, music, and theater on offer. She wrote to Arabella that she felt “just like a prisoner let loose.” She worried at her excessive fondness for the city’s attractions but nonetheless “revel[ed] in the superb orchestras, magnificent architecture, beautiful faces and delicious voices.” She felt as if she were at the center of the universe, where “stars of every magnitude have come to shine in the New World.”16
In the midst of so much culture, her Herald letters allowed her to begin to develop the critical opinions that she would hone during her literary career. Her hearing was still strong enough to allow her to make distinctions between the fine performance of the city’s premier amateur musical society and the disappointing Italian opera at the French Theatre, where the prima donna’s voice was past its prime. Ever a lover of the theater, she relished Joseph Jefferson’s performance of Rip Van Winkle and Edwin Booth’s of Cardinal Richelieu. She also told her Cleveland readers about the growing fame of their own Clara Morris, who had just made her New York acting debut in a new comedy.17
Constance felt sure of herself reviewing music and theater, but art was another matter. Having previously had little exposure to it, she was rather baffled by many of the works in the Academy of Design’s new exhibition. For now her taste in literature dictated her expectations from art: she was not so much on the lookout for beauty as for fidelity to reality. She apparently found little of it on display at the exhibition. The most flawed picture to her mind was “The Landing of the Pilgrims,” by an artist named Wopper, who, she determined, “certainly omitted the ‘A’ in [front of] his name.” Portraits of the Pilgrims in print or on canvas had been notoriously false, she admitted, but this picture strained all credulity: “One woman . . . is much to be pitied owing to the evident dislocation of her neck and the absence of any spinal column.”18
As James would later write of Henrietta Stackpole, “the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything.” Constance discovered this for the first time in New York, and forever after in her travels she carried with her the license of being a writer, which gave her the freedom to peer into the places mere tourists avoided. But she also wanted her pen to give her a kind of cover, hiding her from the stares of strangers, allowing her to observe without being observed. This is what prevented her from ever becoming a Kate Field or a Henrietta Stackpole. In later years, after her fame made the Herald attach her name to some letters she penned about her travels, she would feel the sting of exposure. She would come to loathe writing newspaper letters. “I do not like to approach so near the public. It is too ‘personal’ a place for a lady,” she decided.19
Fiction was a much safer place for a shy woman such as herself, for there she could express her opinions and feelings behind the veil of fictional characters. While in New York, she wrote two stories set at Christmastime that pay tribute to Dickens, who had died earlier that year, and provide glimpses of another New York. One, “A Merry Christmas,” featured Zeph’s war experience. The other suggests that however much the status of a literary woman freed her from convention, her gender, particularly as an unmarried woman, limited her access to the public world. In “Cicely’s Christmas,” New York becomes a cruel, inhospitable place for an unchaperoned female of limited means. It is Christmas Day, and a fashionable church is so overcrowded that Cicely can’t hear the music or see the service. She is forced to spend an exorbitant sum for a ten-course dinner, only half of which she is able to eat. The men of the city are rude and lascivious, jostling her on a crowded streetcar and ignoring her pleas for directions. At a play, admirers offend her with their advances. When Cicely complains, the usher replies unpityingly, “[M]ost ladies has gentlemen with them in such a crowd.”20
Although we can’t assume these were exactly Constance’s experiences, the story teems with the loneliness she felt in the bustling city. Despite the presence of Charlie and Flora and a visit from George and Clara, she felt like a “desolate spinster.” And although she had met many friendly people in New York, none could make up for the loss of Arabella and her father.21 After the initial giddiness over her freedom in New York, her sorrow about being all alone in the world had returned with a vengeance.
GONE!
On the morning of February 7, 1871, Constance awoke to a frantic knocking on her door and an urgent voice announcing that a telegram had arrived. The message within informed her that her brother-in-law, George S. Benedict, was presumed dead. She had seen him during one of his business trips to New York and had just kissed him goodbye, on his way back to Clara and the baby. His train to Cleveland had crashed outside of New Hamburg, New York.
George S. Benedict, Woolson’s brother-in-law and adviser.
(From The Benedicts Abroad, vol. 3 of Five Generations (1785–1923))
Constance packed up her few belongings and caught the first train she could, taking roughly the same route as George’s doomed train. She was overcome with grief and terrorized by images of his fiery death. Harper’s Weekly called the accident “one of the most shocking disasters on record.” The train had collided on a bridge at high speed with a car carrying 500 gallons of oil, which had jumped a neighboring track. The subsequent explosion had burned the forward sleeping car, where George had been. He and his fellow passengers must have died instantly. For the rest of her life, Constance would refuse to sleep on trains, insisting on stopping for the night, even when only the humblest accommodations were available. Nearly twenty years later she would write, “I cannot see the curtains of a sleeping car without a sick feeling.”22
Back in Cleveland, Constance joined her shocked family and community in mourning. She spoke for herself and many others in her poem “In Memoriam. G.S.B. February 6, 1871”:
GONE! But we could n
ot understand,
When broken voices said
That he was gone—we could not feel
That GEORGE, our GEORGE, was dead
Until they brought him home, his hands crossed on his breast . . .
So young, so beautiful, so strong,
So dearly, deeply prized,
So needed, trusted, leaned upon,
So loved, so idolized . . .
How can we spare thee, GEORGE? How live
Through the long dreary hours
Without thee? . . .
A small service for the family and close friends was held at Clara and George’s home. Pallbearers carried the casket to Grace Church, overflowing with mourners, where Arabella’s husband, Rev. Washburn, performed the service.23
George had become, in her father’s absence, Constance’s chief adviser and the male relative she relied upon. He was not only her chaperone on her first trip to New York but also her guide to the literary world. He had literally and metaphorically opened to her the doors that remained closed to so many women writers. Who would advise her now? Who would help her negotiate contracts or nudge unresponsive editors who owed her a check? If she were to continue her upward climb, she would have to learn to rise on her own or find another helping hand.
Constance wasn’t sure how to look forward. She later reflected, “I was so despondent, and the future looked so dark, yet I wouldn’t betray how I felt.” That summer came the news of Zeph’s marriage as well. In the stories she began to write of young women who found themselves forsaken and alone in the world, suicidal thoughts emerged. In “Hepzibah’s Story,” the heroine loses all interest in life but can find “no means of dying at hand.” Flower, in “The Flower of the Snow,” leaves Mackinac Island, murmuring, “Desolation! a land of desolation and death!” As she wanders through a bitter snowstorm that has complicated her departure, a devilish voice whispers temptingly in her ear, “What have you to live for? . . . Life will be long and lonely.”24 Constance may have shared her characters’ hopelessness, but she had to put on a brave face. Just as she had stepped into her father’s shoes, Constance now had to take George’s place in Clara’s home with the baby Clare (“Plum,” they called her) and their dependent mother. The part of herself awakened in New York—the literary woman who roamed and observed—was packed away, for good she feared.
Fortunately, Constance found that she was not as entirely alone in her literary pursuits as she had assumed. George’s father, who frequently stopped by Clara’s on his way home from work, became her new “mainstay.” He helped to sustain her connection to the world of ideas and writing, carrying on long conversations with her about his running of the Herald and the latest news. “[H]is encouragement and interest were everything to me,” she later explained. “I don’t believe I should have gone on if I had not had [him] behind me just at that time.” She wrote almost nothing that first year after George’s death, publishing a story in Appletons’, the essay on Cooper, and the two New York stories, which may have been written earlier. But the worries that always followed a male provider’s death brought back the question of how the women left behind would support themselves. Clara had only a small “guardian’s allowance” to support Plum. Charlie (according to the city directory) had returned to Cleveland and, boarding elsewhere, was working as a clerk; his salary would barely maintain himself.25 If the uncertainty of Connie’s economic future after her father’s death had launched her literary career, the greater uncertainty in the wake of her brother-in-law’s death would make her redouble her efforts and question what kind of writer she would be. Would she pursue profit or literary laurels? Was it possible to achieve both?
A DETOUR
During the following year, Constance worked hard, publishing twenty new works, but her earnings were still no better than what a teacher could make, about $700. Even with the income from their father’s Wisconsin lands, they could barely get by. Then she read a newspaper announcement: the Boston publisher D. Lothrop was offering a $1,000 prize for the best new story for their “Sunday school series” of pious books for children. Constance was willing to try anything. The deadline was near, so she “shut herself up in her room and wrote as rapidly as possible.” Clara, out of desperation over their economic situation, did the same. Within a week, they both had manuscripts to enter into the competition.26
The early 1870s were a boom time for children’s literature, beginning with the colossal success of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1868–1869. As Constance was beginning her career in New York, her old professor Samuel St. John from the Cleveland Female Seminary had visited her and given her “fully an hour’s eulogy of Miss Alcott’s ‘Little Women.’ ” She liked the book too “but could not place [it] above all else in the world.” The new cultural status of children’s literature annoyed her, but Alcott and her many imitators had opened up a rich new field, and St. John and others clearly thought this was where women writers could most profitably toil.27
The phenomenal success of an old acquaintance from her school days, who published What Katy Did in 1872, must have further convinced her to try her hand in the children’s market. Susan Coolidge was the pen name of Sarah Woolsey, who was an older sister of a friend from Constance’s schooldays. Constance must have noticed how the book reproduced sites and scenes from their childhood. In an early chapter a quiet war is waged between the girls at two neighboring schools—Mrs. Knight’s (or Mrs. Day’s, which the Woolsey girls attended) and Miss Miller’s (or Miss Fuller’s, which the Woolson girls attended). Constance was astonished at Sarah Woolsey’s success and “a little jealous.” Surely she could do as well, she thought, having herself told stories to her nieces and nephews for so many years.28
Hoping to mimic the successes of Alcott and Coolidge, Woolson wrote a book that similarly focuses on a group of children’s exploits—inspired by those of the Woolson, Mather, and Carter children—before they learn the important lessons they will need to become adults.29 Even the Woolson family dogs, Pete Trone, Esq., and Turk, made appearances. She also included a character much in the vein of Jo from Little Women and Katy from What Katy Did—a wild girl named Bessie who secretly races horses and longs for fame, in her case as an artist.
The Old Stone House won Woolson the coveted prize but not, unfortunately, all of the money promised. The publisher split the award between her and another author. Published in 1873 under the pseudonym Anne March (a tribute to Alcott), the book did not fail, but neither did it prosper. One reviewer, for The Youth’s Companion, found it “pleasant reading” and noted that it “reminds us of Miss Alcott’s ‘Little Women.’ ” The New York Mail proclaimed it “a vivacious, wholesome story, whose chief characters are neither prigs nor rowdies, but true girls and boys, romping and laughing and playing tricks, yet having manly and womanly hearts, that may well serve as examples.”30
Constance, however, was not happy with the results. She would never acknowledge the book, and her authorship of it remained a secret outside of Cleveland until after her death. She had written it too quickly and had to please not only her youthful readers but also a committee of clergyman. She later wrote, “When I had finished and read over the manuscript I was horrified to find it hadn’t the orthodox Sunday school tone but was simply a young people’s story. I went over it carefully and seasoned it at intervals with the lacking pious condiments.” About the same time she wrote a serial for a children’s magazine published in Cleveland, which must have been an equally unsatisfying experience, for she quickly gave up writing for children altogether.31
Clara, meanwhile, was undeterred by not winning the prize. She sent her manuscript out to other firms and found one willing to publish it, but without payment. One Year at Our Boarding-School was barely noticed by reviewers. One complained, rightly, that it read like a diary, concluding, “There is no predominant interest—no grand culmination.”32 If Clara had bested her in marriage, Constance outdid her in the literary sphere. Clara never attempted to publish again. From
Constance’s letters, it appears that her sister was not particularly supportive of her writing, perhaps out of jealousy. Although the sisters would always be close, Clara would resent Constance’s growing devotion to her career.
Fortunately, Clara would soon learn that she and Clare could get by on their own small allowance, with the Benedicts’ assistance. Constance was determined to provide for herself and her mother by producing literature she was proud of. She would return to her earlier conviction that although children’s literature was worthy of a certain rank, “Shakespeare still existed, and Milton; the great historians, the great essayists, the great writers of fiction.” Remarkably, she set her sights on this latter category, to which few women writers—none of them American—had been granted access.33 Her early successes with the high literary magazines Harper’s and Appletons’ had stirred up her long-dormant ambitions. Thus this quiet, thirty-two-year-old woman from Cleveland, who had ventured into the literary arena seeking a means of support, began to hope and work for that most elusive of goals: recognition as a serious artist.
5
Departures
HAVING PUT her experiment with children’s literature behind her, Constance was ready to embark on the first major phase of her career. Beginning in the fall of 1873, a veritable flood of the finest stories she had yet written came pouring from her pen. Unfortunately, little evidence remains of how and when she wrote them. During the past few years in Cleveland, she had made brief trips through Detroit and across Lake Huron to Mackinac and down the Ohio River, refreshing her memories of some of her favorite haunts, taking notes along the way. Upon her return, after unpacking and receiving a string of curious visitors wanting to hear about her trips, she settled back down at her desk to fill her blank books with drafts of stories written in pencil.1 Eventually, neatly written manuscripts of tales set in and around the Great Lakes made their way to editors out east.
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