Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Knowing that the vast majority of her audience only read for the love story, as Woolson wrote half-contemptuously in her notebooks, she could not let her heroine find contentment in independence, as she had. So she gave Anne a grand romance, complete with a Byronic lover named Heathcote, in honor of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. He is also very much like Rochester in Jane Eyre, in that he is an arrogant man of wealth and status who has lived a dissipated life. As in Woolson’s favorite novels, The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre, Anne is tempted by her lover to fulfill her own selfish desires without regard to duty. Although married to Anne’s friend Helen, after having been engaged to her from a young age, Heathcote urges Anne, “Come, let everything go to the winds, as I do, and say you love me; for I know you do.” But Anne does not make the same mistake as Maggie Tulliver. Instead, like Jane Eyre, she clings heroically to her sense of what is right and finds her self-respect in silent suffering. Although Woolson would become known for valorizing her heroines’ self-abnegation, she never romanticized it. Anne learns that “suffering is just as hard to bear whether one is noble or ignoble, good or bad,” that “it is the long monotony of dangerless days that tries the spirit hardest.”33

  From here the novel takes a strange, sudden turn into the territory of a murder mystery. When Helen is found dead and Heathcote is suspected of having killed his wife, Anne turns detective to exonerate him. To many readers the final section of the novel is a jarring development (not unlike that created by the final third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which turns into a farce). However, Woolson’s plot device allowed her to grant Anne greater agency and to explore a theme that had surfaced in her own writing career: the publicity of women’s private selves. Vividly evoked in a climactic courtroom scene, Anne’s confession of her love for Heathcote is read aloud before a crowd of rapacious reporters and onlookers. All eyes are on Anne, surveying her appearance and judging her. This was to Woolson the climax of the book, the moment at which Anne must reveal her deepest, truest self to the world. The scene is a graphic rendering of Woolson’s own self-revelation, which she performed over and over again in her writing. It suggests how exposed she felt, putting herself before the public in the form of a semiautobiographical heroine whose emotional life in many ways mirrored her own.

  In spite of readers’ insistence on a love story, Woolson had no intention of giving her lovers a fairy-tale ending. But her first reader, Hannah, wanted one.34 Woolson made it quick, ushering Anne to the altar in the final three pages, after Heathcote’s name has been cleared by Anne’s discovery of Helen’s real murderer. By then, Heathcote, like Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, is a weakened and humbled man, having been wounded in the war and freed from jail by Anne’s detective work. Although he had earlier often referred to her as a child, he now must recognize her as the capable woman she has become. The real happy ending for Woolson, however, was returning Anne to Mackinac Island. She gave her heroine the home she herself would always yearn for.

  The novel finally completed, Woolson wrote to Stedman in May 1878 that she was “ ‘finished’ too!” She was exhausted, having worked for nine hours a day for at least a month. She had no idea whether her novel was good, but she had made an honest try of it. Although Osgood was eager to get his hands on it, Woolson’s confidence in him had crumbled. She went with the house that had launched her career, Harper & Brothers. Her affection for them would wane, however. Seven months later, in January 1879, she wrote to Stedman, “Do you wonder what has become of my novel? I think you will see it in print during the year. I say no more; although I would like to. You can have no idea how fond I am now of Mr Osgood. I fairly dream of him at night.”35 She would continue to dream for two long years, her manuscript gathering dust, while Harper & Brothers published other novels ahead of hers and she waited to see if she could make her mark as a novelist.

  HANNAH’S LAST YEAR

  Once done with the first draft, Constance did not have long to enjoy the accomplishment of completing her first serious novel. The manuscript had to be revised and copied, and the heat of a Florida summer was on its way. Hannah wanted to be near Charlie in Chicago but realized that Constance needed fresh air, so they spent the summer in the seaside resort of Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, where they were joined by the Benedicts, Clara and Plum, in a farmhouse on a hill behind the town. Constance worked hard all day but allowed herself a daily swim.

  Soon it was time to chase the sun south again, but Constance and Hannah were tiring of the race. Instead they returned to Yonkers with Clara and Plum. Charlie soon joined them. He was ill, presumably with headaches and depression. Charlie stayed until the first of December, fulfilling Hannah’s dream of having all of her living children once more under the same roof. After he left and the Benedicts went back to Cleveland for Christmas, Constance and her mother still did not pack their trunks. Hannah could not see the necessity. She felt “like a child who lives in the present and neither plans for nor cares for the future.” The days were bright and very cold, but with the base burner running all day and night, her rheumatism and worrisome cough were kept at bay. When a severe cold snap hit, Constance fell ill, developing a high fever. Hannah had to take care of her delirious daughter on her own. Somehow they muddled through the worst of it, and in mid-January, although Constance could barely stand, they finally sailed south.36

  An invalid and a convalescent, they were both in need of a cure this time. They returned to the area of Hibernia and Green Cove Springs, famed for its hot sulfur waters. Unfortunately, Hannah found no miracle to help her regain her strength. Her health deteriorated rapidly. Word was sent to Clara, who arrived at their mother’s bedside in time to see Hannah take her last, labored breath on February 13, 1879.37

  Alone with their dead mother and unsure where to turn, Constance and Clara telegraphed the Mathers in Cleveland. “Bring Mother here to us” was the reply from their brother-in-law Samuel. Clara later wrote that she and her sister “lived on [that telegram] during that dreadful journey north.” The fact that he had simply called her “Mother” instead of “your mother” meant everything to the grieving daughters.38 When they arrived in Cleveland, Constance’s first return in almost seven years, they brought Hannah’s body to the Mathers’ house and leaned on them through the funeral and for many weeks afterward. The Mathers—Samuel, his two children with Georgiana (Sam and Kate), and Samuel’s second wife, Lizzie, who had been a dear friend to Hannah—were now the only family Constance had left besides Charlie, Clara, and Clare.

  Although she had often resented the burden of being Hannah’s primary caretaker, Constance’s reaction to her mother’s death was not relief. She had also felt grounded by her responsibility to her; now she felt unmoored. She had lost the one person in the world who both loved and needed her. When her father had died, she hadn’t been able to grieve for long because she had new responsibilities. With her mother gone too, the “daughter’s country” she had inhabited vanished. At thirty-nine, she was both exile and orphan.

  Hannah’s death plunged Constance into a deep depression from which Clara despaired of ever retrieving her. Constance would later describe it as a full physical and emotional collapse. Clara whisked her grieving sister away for a change of scenery to Washington, D.C., where Constance wandered almost daily among the white headstones in Arlington Cemetery, as if she herself were no longer among the living. One day she wrote to Stedman, “I am so very desolate without my Mother that I cannot speak of it. The whole world is changed to me. The one person who loved me dearly has gone. Nothing,—nobody,—can ever fill her empty place. She was ‘glad[’] to go. But I miss her,—miss her. . . . I have got to learn how to live, over again.”39

  In an effort to emerge from the darkness of grief, Constance reached for her lifeline—her pen. One of the first stories she wrote was “Mrs. Edward Pinckney,” about a destitute mother trying to raise her children in the absence of a vagrant, alcoholic husband. The story, set in Washington, D.C., near Arlington Cemetery
, was a tribute to Hannah’s lost hopes for Charlie. In the story, the narrator—a genteel woman who looks out for the family—blames the drunken husband for the wife’s woes and is astonished at Mrs. Pinckney’s continued devotion to him. The wife explains, “I have loved him deeply, dearly, all my life; and he has been—what you have seen.” When he dies, the narrator understands the relief she must feel: “[N]ow she need never be obliged to see his weaknesses and faults, never be forced to witness his failures, but could think of him peacefully as he once was, as he would be again in some future life.”40 Such was the peace Constance imagined Hannah had attained. Death had delivered her from the sorrow of seeing Charlie fail further in life, and Constance was grateful.

  After Washington, Clara and Constance traveled to Cooperstown for the summer, to mourn Hannah’s loss among those who had known her longest. Constance’s grief only intensified while she was there. She was tormented by recurring thoughts that her hard work on Anne had caused her collapse in Yonkers and taxed Hannah’s frail health as she nursed her. Jane Carter comforted Constance with the assurance that her care had “prolonged Mother’s life for years.”41 That consolation was everything to her during those early months of mourning. But her mother’s hometown was a constant reminder of her presence. Like Hannah thirty-nine years earlier, after the deaths of her three young daughters, Constance needed to leave the place of old associations where she could see Hannah at every turn—sitting by the window, playing cards in front of the fire, or laughing at her own memories as Constance rowed her in a boat on Otsego Lake.

  Clara watched helplessly as her sister’s mental and physical health deteriorated. Just as their father had picked up Hannah after the girls’ deaths in 1840 and carried her away from Claremont, so too did Clara need to carry Constance away from Cooperstown and all of the places their mother had lived. The most logical destination was Europe, so Clara booked them passage on a steamer, and Constance finally began to see the void in front of her fill with images of the faraway places she had long dreamed of visiting.

  PART THREE

  A European

  Experiment

  1879–1886

  “[Florence has] taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James. He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three weeks.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  “I am not strong enough to take much part in Society, or go out much, and do writing-work at the same time. The best of me goes into my writing.”

  —CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  7

  The Old World at Last

  AS THE train lurched through the frozen French countryside, a porter came into the train compartment and took from beneath Constance’s feet the tin box full of water that was more valuable to her than precious jewels. He would soon return with it full of hot water, but in the meantime she, Clara, and Clare, now twelve, shivered and complained bitterly. They could see nothing out of the frosted windows.

  The travelers spent the night in Lyon, where the piles of snow reached their heads, and in the morning boarded another frigid train to Marseille. During the day, the windows began to clear, and the white countryside gradually gave way to fields and vineyards, with châteaux and castles dotting the landscape. Constance began to revive. The next day, she gradually unpeeled the layers of cloaks and wraps that had failed to keep her warm. The tin box was taken away for good. Finally they reached the Riviera and the bluest sea Constance had ever seen.1

  STARTING OFF

  Three weeks earlier, on November 30, 1879, they had stepped off the steamship Gallia in Liverpool, England. Constance had no plans to return to the United States. She had always expected that when she finally made it to Europe she would stay indefinitely.2 The weather may have made her question the longevity of her enthusiasm, however.

  Their arrival in Europe had occurred during the worst winter of the century. From Liverpool to London, houses and trees had been coated in ice. They dared spend only ten days in gloomy London, where Constance, despite her fear of the cold, insisted on visiting all of the major tourist sites, from the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London to Madame Tussaud’s, which Clare had longed to see. She found walking the aisles of Westminster Abbey to be one of the greatest pleasures of her life, and pored over the pictures in the National Gallery, instructed by her Baedeker guidebook and catalogs. She was determined to learn to appreciate painting as well as she had music, but she had a long way to go, she realized. Her hearing had become so poor that others referred to her as “deaf,” but she had brought with her a new device called an Audiphone that seemed to be working quite well. It resembled a curved fan and was held up to the teeth, creating vibrations that allowed her to hear a delightful Punch and Judy show that she and Clare watched in the street below their windows.3

  The three had hoped to see Paris, but after a bitterly cold channel crossing they found it virtually shut down and buried under great piles of ice and snow. When they reached the Riviera, they stopped finally at Menton, near the Italian border. The small resort town, a balmy, sunshiny oasis protected from the northerly winds by the Maritime Alps, was a popular wintering place for European aristocrats and invalids. It was, in Constance’s eyes, “the ‘St. Augustine’ of France.” She felt a little homesick for Florida, but the foreignness and antiquity of the region delighted her. Her senses feasted on the fragrance of roses, heliotropes, and olive and lemon trees. She relished the castle ruins, Roman aqueducts, picturesque villages that clung to the mountainsides, and the sight of peasant girls in red handkerchiefs.4 Above all, the bright sun and unmatched blueness of the sea began to rouse her from her long depression.

  Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean Constance had let the cloak of responsibility fall from her shoulders. While her mother was alive, she had hidden her unconventional identity as an author behind the persona of a devoted daughter. Now she was a writer above all else. She had come to Europe not only to see the sights but also to write.

  Her motivation was creative as well as monetary. Clara had been paying a greater share of their expenses so far, but Constance did not intend to rely on her sister’s generosity indefinitely. She needed to start earning her own money again if she was going to stay in Europe. Her plan was to settle down for a few months in each place; constant travel and hotels were too expensive, while pensions, or boardinghouses where one stayed on a longer basis, were cheaper. She was earning only about $600 a year at the time so had to economize as much as possible.5

  In Menton she set to work, writing an essay on the region for Harper’s, a story for Lippincott’s, and the beginning of a “novelette”—she was not ready to tackle another long project. While Anne had come out of her own struggles, this short novel would be devoted to her mother’s memory and the complications of older women’s lives after marriage, childbearing, and widowhood. Inspired by the Alps, she looked back to the summer of 1874 in Asheville and set her novel high up in the Carolina peaks. But she would not complete For the Major for two years. The memories were still too fresh.

  Constance worked every day until one in the afternoon, sitting at a desk that looked out on the Mediterranean. Four and a half hours wasn’t nearly enough, she wrote to her nephew, Sam, but “Clara looks so tragic if I attempt anything more.” Clara had adopted a motherly role with her sister, whose health and mental state remained fragile one year after their mother’s death. Thoughts of her mother invariably brought on tears. Recalling Hannah’s concerns for Charlie, Constance wrote to him dutifully, but she did not hear anything in return. He had begun his life over again, this time in California. Finally, after having written him six letters, she received a response. Depressed and suffering from headaches again, he had checked himself into a hospital. Constance could not sleep for thinking of his pain and their mother’s old worries, which now seem to have passed to her.6

  Clara insisted on pulling Connie away from her writing table. They joined excursions to nearby castles and ruins, ri
ding up into the mountains on donkeys that, to Constance’s mind, were “the most ridiculous animals in the world; and the man who rides him next.” They picnicked in town plazas and lunched in country inns, enjoying the local wine, which was stronger than they thought and made them a rather merry group.7

  In spite of the scenery and libations, Constance’s health and mood seemed to improve only marginally during their four-month stay on the Riviera. Although the sun shone brightly, Menton was not as warm as Florida. It remained cold in the shade, and the rooms were not heated. While she worked at her desk, the temperature inside could be fifty-four degrees. It might as well be snowing outside, she complained. She still felt rather weak and “obliged to exercise the greatest care, lest I break down again.” She also had a persistent cough and felt rather lonely, she admitted, despite the presence of her sister and niece. Clara worried over her and had become, in their mother’s absence, her main emotional outlet, but they were temperamentally quite different—Clara extroverted and Connie introverted. She felt a greater kinship with Clare, who reminded her of herself at that age. She had the same reserve and acute sensitivity. “She and I are great ‘cronies,’ ” she would later explain. “[We] talk long hours together with the greatest mental satisfaction. We are thoroughly ‘simpatica.’ ”8