Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  A view of Menton, France, where Constance’s spirits began to revive.

  (From “At Mentone,” in Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu)

  “‘MISS GRIEF’”

  Teetering on the edge of mental and physical well-being, Woolson wrote that winter her most powerful and provocative story, “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” which would be published in Lippincott’s in May 1880. Set in a vaguely described Rome, which she would not visit for over a year, the story exists in a kind of limbo—somewhere between America and Europe and between her life as a daughter and her independent existence as a writer. Into the main character, Aaronna Moncrief, whom the unnamed male narrator insists on calling “Miss Grief,” Woolson channeled her grief over her mother’s loss and her anxieties about fully embracing the identity of an ambitious author.

  Aaronna Moncrief is a writer struggling to gain the attention of the male literary elite. She approaches the narrator, who is a successful male writer, for his assessment of her work, hoping that he will ultimately help her to publish it. Arriving on his doorstep dressed all in black, as if she is in mourning, she appears to be on the verge of death herself. At first, the narrator calls her “eccentric and unconventional” and views her as having “sacrificed her womanly claims by her persistent attacks upon my door.” He thinks she wants to sell him something, but when he learns that she is a writer, he exclaims, “An authoress! This is worse than old lace.” She also appears to him “shabby, unattractive, and more than middle-aged” and thus undeserving of (or simply uninterested in) men’s attention. Woolson thus emphasized that Aaronna approached the male writer as a peer and not as a potential romantic object. Only after having discovered Aaronna’s “divine spark of genius” does he begin to respect her.9

  Later, when she tells the narrator she would have killed herself had he failed to acknowledge the value of her writings, he is shocked by her sensationalism. But she explains, “I should have destroyed only this poor tenement of clay.”10 It was easy for Woolson, who believed that the next world was a peaceful place, to understand Aaronna’s disregard for her earthly existence. She has been living only for her work and the hope of seeing its worth recognized.

  Ultimately the narrator is unable to help Aaronna publish her work. It is inherently flawed in vaguely specified ways, and when he tries to improve it for her, he finds it is no longer any good. What had made her writings so strong is precisely what makes them unacceptable to a wider audience, or at least to the male editors who act as the gatekeepers to the literary world. Aaronna, meanwhile, is starving, literally and figuratively. On her deathbed, she requests that the narrator bury her writings with her, except for the drama “Armor,” which he has told her, falsely, will be published. After her death he keeps it as a reminder of his own good fortune as an author. Capable of seeing in her what others cannot, he is moved by the pathos of her failure. She, however, dies happy, knowing that he at least has recognized her power as a writer.

  No other story by a nineteenth-century American woman so powerfully dramatizes the yearning for literary recognition and the insurmountable obstacles women faced in pursuit of it. (The most comparable work thematically is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse, Aurora Leigh.) In spite of its bleakness, however, Woolson’s story portrays the possibility of a sensitive individual overcoming his prejudice toward an “authoress” and appreciating the merit of her work, even if it does not conform to the standard expectations for polite literature. The surprise of the story isn’t so much the woman writer’s failure and death—Madame de Staël had long before established that theme in her novel Corinne. Nor is it the failure of women, in particular, to see the value in another woman’s work. The narrator’s fiancée, a conventional woman named Isabel Abercrombie, sees Aaronna’s poems as the product of a disturbed mind. Rather, the surprise is the male writer’s acknowledgment of her unconventional genius. That others cannot recognize it makes his understanding all the more valuable.

  Yet the story remains a powerful indictment of the male literary elite. Although Aaronna never voices resentment for the neglect she has endured, her aunt, who has accompanied her to Europe, vents her spleen most emphatically, charging male authors not merely with neglect but also with theft. “YOU literary men,” she shouts at the narrator, “shall not rack and stab her any more on this earth. . . . Vampires! you take her ideas and fatten on them, and leave her to starve.”11 The critics seem to suck the life out of Aaronna, flourishing while she wastes away. Aaronna’s fate was not Woolson’s, but these lines convey some of her own anger. Although she had climbed quite high in the six years since the prizewinning The Old Stone House, she still felt as if her efforts had been more arduous than others’.

  In her letters to Hayne, who seemed to think of her as the golden writer of the moment, she repeatedly referred to herself as an “outside barbarian” and “Philistine.” She belonged to no literary community, she insisted. But she was keenly aware that close-knit literary fraternities existed, particularly in Boston and New York. As she had told Hayne, she had learned that William Dean Howells had favorites he promoted at the Atlantic. During the two years he had held on to “Rodman the Keeper”—time when she therefore felt unable to submit additional work to that magazine—he was publishing some of his favorites at a rapid rate. At the top of the list was Henry James, who had two serialized novels and a story published in the Atlantic during those same two years. Howells was enamored. “In richness of expression and splendor of literary performance, we may . . . find none greater than [James],” he gushed.12

  Many have noted superficial similarities between James and the privileged male writer in Woolson’s story—both wrote “delightful little studies of society,” took Balzac as a model, wrote stories featuring antiquities, have inherited money, and have achieved a certain critical and popular success. She had not met James when she wrote the story but had heard much about him not only from the literary columns of the leading periodicals but also from his friend John Hay, whom she had met in Cleveland in the months after her mother’s death.13

  Hay was a former secretary to Abraham Lincoln and a literary man, a fellow member of the Atlantic’s “Contributors’ Club.” He was well known for his dialect poetry, set in the rural Illinois of his childhood, as well as his essays on Spain, published in the Atlantic and collected as Castilian Days in 1871. He would soon write a wildly popular novel attacking labor, The Bread-Winners, published in 1883, and coauthor the ten-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1890, that would establish the president’s legacy as we know it today. By the time Woolson sailed for Europe, Hay had become assistant secretary of state, and he would two decades later serve as secretary of state under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

  John Hay—former secretary to Lincoln, statesman, editor, and writer—became a close friend and adviser to Woolson. Photograph circa 1870.

  (Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)

  Hay had surely approached Woolson during her stay in Cleveland after hearing about her from their mutual friend, Stedman. Hay had married the Cleveland heiress Clara Stone, whose younger sister, Flora, was being courted by Constance’s nephew, Sam. They would, in fact, soon marry, making Hay and Woolson relatives of sorts by marriage. It seems likely that when they met Hay and Woolson discussed his friend Henry James, about whom she was already curious. Hay had known James since 1875, when he helped him become the Paris correspondent to the New York Tribune, where Hay was an editorial writer. He was perhaps James’s greatest supporter next to Howells, coming to his defense in the Atlantic’s “Contributors’ Club” when the expatriate author came under attack for his provocative yet wildly popular story “Daisy Miller.”14 Hay certainly encouraged Woolson to meet James while in Europe, and the ease with which she had gained Hay’s friendship must have lessened her fears about how men of letters regarded her. In fact, Hay quickly became an ardent supporter of hers, rivaling Stedman in his praise and advice.

/>   APPROACHING MR. JAMES

  When Woolson left for Europe, she had in her trunks a letter of introduction for her and Clara to Henry James from his cousin, Henrietta Pell-Clarke, whom they had met in Cooperstown the previous summer. They had knocked on his door together during their brief stay in London only to find out that James was in Paris. They planned to approach him there but had fled too quickly.15

  It might seem bold on Woolson’s part to seek out the writer who would one day become known as “the Master.” However, it was common for European-bound Americans to seek out prominent authors, as James himself had done when he first emigrated. One of his visits was to George Eliot, on whose door he knocked in 1869. In Woolson’s case, with a proper letter of introduction and female relatives in tow, she could approach a celebrated writer without raising eyebrows.

  Nonetheless, the act was a departure for Constance, who four years earlier had claimed, “[I]f there is anything I dread it is a new acquaintance. I evade, and avoid, and back away from everybody.”16 But Henry James was different. Not only was she willing to make the advance, but she also rather openly alluded to him in “ ‘Miss Grief.’ ” On its surface, the story suggests she was nervous about how he would perceive her as a literary woman. More than that, though, it hints at the mutual recognition she hoped for.

  In “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” Woolson imagined a stark contrast between the two writers. Aaronna tells the narrator, “You were young—strong—rich—praised—loved—successful: all that I was not. I wanted to look at you—and imagine how it would feel. You had success—but I had the greater power.”17 His work is sophisticated and much sought after, but he has been playing it safe. Aaronna thinks he is capable of much more based on one particular work of his, which she recites. He realizes that it was his favorite and most ambitious writing, which the public had ignored. Aaronna’s work, on the other hand, is daring, aimed at something beyond temporary applause, but it lacks the refinement and polish that would make it palatable. Both writers are, in a sense, incomplete. She may possess the greater power, but he has qualities that have ensured his greater success.

  The writings of Woolson and James had been discussed in similar terms by reviewers, and although she sharpened the contrast for a greater effect in the story, it seems she had particular reviews of their work in mind when she wrote “ ‘Miss Grief.’ ” On her side, it was a review she had saved of Two Women that appeared in Appletons’. It was at once the most favorable and most critical review she ever received. Although it did not mean the death of her career, as the critics’ judgment of Aaronna’s writing does, it contributed to the end of Woolson’s career as a poet and seems to have lingered long in her mind as a definitive judgment of her writing.

  The review contained extremely high praise, finding in the verse drama as well as her Great Lakes stories “a strength such as has not informed any woman’s writing, that we remember in some years of American magazine literature; and a force and freshness that has belonged to few men in that time.” (Aaronna’s work is also deemed by the male judges to have “force” and “power,” two words that were routinely used to describe Woolson’s own writings.) Yet the reviewer determined that the flaws of Two Women emanated not from “insufficient culture,” a possibility he first considered, but from the artist’s impulse to disdain convention and let the “force of feeling . . . cover up the awkward phrase, the prosaic allusion.” He suspected that Woolson “will not polish or elaborate but will let her thought, where it spoke out strongly, stand in its first crude expression rather than weakening it by change.” Woolson had told Stedman’s friend R. R. Bowker as much, claiming she was unable to revise her poetry, although she took great pains with her prose. (Aaronna also says she cannot see how to improve her own writing.)18 What is lacking, ultimately, is control. Although she possessed the artist’s instincts in great measure, he believed she was unable to refine her work into highly polished art.

  Bowker’s advice about Two Women had been to put the poem in a drawer and read Keats and Shelley, advice that was not dissimilar to what Emily Dickinson famously heard from the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, interestingly, had sought out Woolson after reading Two Women. Although not nearly as experimental as Dickinson’s radical verse, Two Women contained a similarly raw power. But power and originality were not enough to gain the favor of the male literary elite, which Dickinson renounced and Woolson continued to seek. Her problem, she realized, was that while force of feeling mattered more to her than refinement, the critics did not agree. (“To me originality and force are everything,” the narrator tells Aaronna, “but the world at large will not overlook as I do your absolutely barbarous shortcomings on account of them.”)19

  While Woolson wrestled with the critical judgment of her work, Henry James seemed to be receiving never-ending accolades. She later told him as much: “I do’nt think you appreciated, over there among the chimney-pots, the laudation your books received in America, as they came out one by one. (We little fish did! We little fish became worn to skeletons owing to the constant admonitions we received to regard the beauty, the grace, the incomparable perfections of all sorts & kinds of the proud salmon of the pond.[)]” She didn’t hide from him the jealousy she had felt—“we ended by hating that salmon”—but she certainly overstated the unanimity of his critical success. Although he was widely regarded as one of America’s most accomplished story writers, when his novel The Europeans was published at the end of 1878, the reviews were mixed. Some critics had grown weary of his style and sounded a note that was in many ways the reverse of the message Woolson had received with the publication of Two Women. For instance, Richard Grant White wrote in the North American Review that James’s novels exhibited great skill but lacked “vital force in their personages. . . . His men and women, although they talk exceedingly well, are bloodless.” As a result, his work demonstrated “great half-exercised powers.” In this formulation, he is just as incomplete an artist as the male narrator of “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” who admires the “originality and force” of Aaronna’s writings precisely because he doesn’t possess them “to any marked degree” himself.20

  When Woolson registered her own opinion of The Europeans in the Atlantic’s “Contributors’ Club,” she wasn’t as hard on James, but she did have her criticisms. Approaching his novel as a fellow writer, she had some advice for a peer she respected but thought could develop his art further. She deemed The Europeans “his best work so far” but found “his peculiar style of mere hints . . . better adapted to a short story . . . than to the broader limits of a novel, where we are accustomed to more explanation and detail.” In The Europeans he had “advanced in his art,” she wrote almost facetiously, to the point where “there is absolutely no action at all.” What is left is “contrast of character, and conversation,” so she proceeded to evaluate the novel on those terms, judging most of his characters either shadowy failures or unfairly ridiculed for their earnestness or lack of beauty. Thus, she more or less agreed with White and those who viewed his characterization as wanting. Yet she also agreed with those, like Howells, who found his style delightful and at times perfect.21

  As her review appeared, so did a number of other quite negative ones, inspiring Woolson to pick up her pen again, this time in defense of James. In her second review in the “Contributors’ Club,” published the same month that her mother died, she wrote, “It is certainly evident that [James] has not the genuine story-telling gift, the power of inventing a story interesting for its own sake. His talent lies in another field, that of keen observation and fine discrimination of character, which he portrays with a subtle and delicate touch. It is unreasonable, I think, to complain of a writer for not being something else than he is. . . . Let us do without a story in Mr. James’s novels, and enjoy instead something certainly as admirable in its way.” Observing the “refined skill” with which he presented his contrasting characters on every page was “pleasure sufficient.” Although she clearly preferred a dynamic
plot and worried that the novel of analysis threatened to crowd out the novel of action, she admired James’s style and was broad-minded in her appreciation of writing different from her own. Like James in his later essay “The Art of Fiction,” she “grant[ed] the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée.”22

  Woolson’s first review of The Europeans suggested that she felt James had far to go to perfect his art—to marry, in a sense, his best qualities as a writer with those she possessed. She, on her side, would have to effect a similar feat in order to become a more complete artist. But in “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” she suggested that the male writer’s faults were more readily overlooked. For he possessed privileges—a superior education, social distinction, and fraternity—from which she was excluded. While Woolson had anonymously joined the “Contributors’ Club” in the pages of the Atlantic, James belonged to a real club of literary men who supported each other in and out of print. More than that, though, she seemed to feel that her gender contributed to the flaws pointed out by critics. Although the Two Women reviewer never directly associated her writings’ faults with being female, the correlation was nonetheless implied. Her lack of control over the emotional force of her writing could be construed as a feminine trait. She had all along preferred strength over beauty in an attempt to overcome the association of her writing with what was deemed an inferior category of women’s literature. After the publication of Two Women, she had begun to wonder if it was simply instinctive for a woman to value a work’s emotional power over—or at least alongside—its formal finish. As White’s review of The Europeans suggests, however, some men shared her preferences.

  The goal, as she then saw it, was to strike a balance between feeling and form. She would spend the rest of her career more or less working toward that goal. In the meantime, “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” also suggests that she may have hoped James would likewise see the value of seeking a middle ground between the two poles. She was eager to find a new literary friend, someone as helpful and encouraging as Stedman had been, yet someone as committed to the literary art of fiction as she was. This time she wasn’t in search of a mentor. James had much to teach her, she felt, but she had plenty to offer as well.