Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  During James’s six-week stay, he and Woolson would determine once and for all the nature of their relationship. Were they companions, bachelor and spinster, who could conceivably take the next step toward romance? Or were they writers, that breed apart, who could live outside of the conventional arrangements between men and women? Woolson may have wanted to remain a “proper woman,” but her friendship with James was charting new territory that her mother and sisters would not have dared to enter. And he was certainly as conservative as she in his desire to conceal his private life.

  Only a few people knew of their living arrangements—Boott, the Duvenecks, Baldwin, and possibly Alice. James wrote of his new situation to his sister-in-law but made no mention of Woolson. Woolson’s letters to her nephew, Sam, make no reference to her tenant. Instead, she focuses on her contentment with her new home. “I am so happy here, Sam, that . . . it is pathetic—almost. The old Auntie enjoys, like a child, her own cups & saucers, & chairs & tables. The view is a constant Paradise to me.” James, below her, wrote the very next day in similar tones. “I sit here making love to Italy,” he told a friend in London. “At this divine moment she is perfectly irresistible.” He attributed his bliss to his surroundings, the “supercelestial” Villa Brichieri, and the new flowers of spring. “There is nothing personal or literary in the air,” he insisted. “The only intelligent person in the place [Florence] is [the writer] Violet Paget.” To Katherine de Kay Bronson, a widow and close friend of the late Robert Browning, who lived in Venice, he casually mentioned that he had met one of her kinswomen who “appeared here yesterday punctually to call on my neighbor Miss Woolson, on whom I was also calling.”15

  Although they were living under the same roof, they were in separate apartments with separate entrances, so their afternoons together were essentially visits. His account to his brother William indicates that he wrote all day in his quiet rooms and then went down to Florence every evening for dinner.16 To William’s wife, Alice, he wrote that he had his own cook. However, he and Woolson must have shared Angelo, who surely prepared meals for two when James was in the house. Undoubtedly they had many meals together, as they had the previous December when he was living nearby.

  Henry James stayed in the downstairs apartment of Woolson’s villa for six weeks in 1887, visiting with her daily. Photograph from 1890.

  (Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr and Other Family Papers, MS Am 1094 [2246, f.33], by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  The two were hardly alone on their hilltop, however. Francis, Lizzie, Frank, and the baby were again in residence at the Villa Castellani. A constant stream of visitors from Florence kept Woolson very busy, as she complained in letters. She had limited social calls to one day a week and did not return them, assuming that people came as much for recreation and the view as to see her. In April and May, while James was living downstairs, every American in Italy seemed to be in town for the series of fetes leading up to the unveiling of the Duomo’s new façade.

  As the event neared, the city was bursting with excitement about “the processions, the fireworks & illuminations, regattas, tournaments, races, etc.” Woolson thought that up on her hill she could stay above the fray, but her position perched above the city proved to be the best place to watch the fireworks. For five evenings in a row she had guests to entertain. As they were English, she had to serve tea and discuss the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, their dearest project. Woolson felt as if she were the abused animal in the scenario, especially when they waited in vain night after night for the promised pyrotechnics. Finally, the night of the illumination arrived. All of Florence “blazed with light,” and “the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Dome of the Cathedral, & all the spires & campaniles were outlined in lines of glittering stars.” The hills all around glowed with bonfires.17

  Sitting outside during the cool nights took its toll, however, and soon Woolson fell ill. Dr. Baldwin made a house call, and James repaid her kindness by helping to care for her. This isn’t the picture usually drawn of their friendship, in which her devotion to him is often portrayed as one-sided. However, Woolson later told the English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, about James’s “great kindness and attention to her when she was ill.” When Burnett later met him, she “found him all that [Woolson] described, most gentlemanly, kind and attentive—a charming man, indeed.”18 The two friends probably never knew of Burnett’s disclosure of their intimacy to a newspaper reporter in Richfield, New York. They would have been horrified if they had.

  Beyond such glimpses, however, their friendship during these years is a virtual blank. Not only did they conceal their proximity to others, they also at some point, probably around this time, made a pact to burn their letters to each other. Some have assumed that James was eager to destroy the secrets he shared with her and that he may have even desired to erase her from his life. Many have also suspected that James and Woolson wished to thwart future biographers. But just as likely, the agreement was intended to maintain their privacy in the present. Letters were often read aloud to friends and family or sent on to others for their enjoyment. James’s and Woolson’s agreement would make their correspondence a private affair. He made no such agreement with anyone else—not even the two other women who were among his closest friends over the years, Grace Norton and Edith Wharton. When Norton once chastised him for reading portions of her letters aloud to others, he responded, “It is indeed, I think, of the very essence of a good letter to be shown,—it is wasted if it be kept for one.” By the same token, she was free to share his letters with others.19 While Norton could not convince him of the necessity of keeping their correspondence an intimate affair, Woolson could and did.

  On her side, the pact to burn letters was not unique, so it was probably her idea. She had a similar arrangement with her sister Clara, whose daughter suggested many years later that the two writers’ agreement to destroy their correspondence was the result of their wish to “write freely.” Clara once noted, “Connie always wrote me when she was going to use me as a ‘safety valve,’ and pour out to me what at that moment was overpowering her.” Constance, who guarded herself so carefully, seems to have grown comfortable revealing private aspects of herself to Henry. The mask she wore for the rest of the world had slipped. “Though I pass for a constantly-smiling, ever-pleased person, [m]y smile is the basest hypocrisy,” she had earlier told him.20 What a relief it was to be able to be herself, as her character Margaret Harold never could.

  The Constance revealed in the letters that do survive could be frustrated at times and even admit to feeling depressed, but she was mostly chatty, witty, and earnestly observant. It is only from her niece Clare that we know another side of her. As Clare later wrote, “My aunt had a passionate and dramatic nature, and a high temper.” This was the Constance who hid behind the smiling façade. Clare continued, “But she was extremely gracious and a wonderful friend. I don’t think that Cousin Henry had those characteristics—he had intellect, humour and an extraordinarily fine perception of other people’s feelings and ideas.” Their personalities complemented each other. Henry offered her his comprehension, which she returned, along with her devotion.21

  What the two writers felt for each other was undoubtedly a kind of love, but one not sanctioned by their era. They had certainly been very fond of each other from the beginning. But after their frequent meetings in London in 1883 and James’s subsequent visits to her elsewhere in England, the affinity between them had flourished. In Italy, not only did they enjoy each other’s company, but they also discovered that they could rely on each other at their most vulnerable times, when they were ill, essentially taking the place of faraway relatives. After living together at the Villa Brichieri, Constance began to call him “Harry.”22 Only his family and old friends from America called him that. Perhaps he also started calling her “Connie,” as all of her family did.

  During
this time they were also drawn together by their mutual friends Francis Boott and his daughter, Lizzie. While Henry was staying with Constance, he too became a part of the quasi-family she had joined. Her great affection for Francis undoubtedly lessened Henry’s fears that she may have been growing exclusively attached to him. He must have felt more comfortable accepting her hospitality and allowing her to approach him more closely now that it was clear her affection was not for him alone. He could show an even greater interest in her without fearing that she might misinterpret his attention as romantic. Whether or not she ever knew that James was sexually attracted to men, as most critics today believe he was, she certainly understood the boundaries of their relationship.

  Although Henry was closer to Constance than anyone else outside of his family, he still raised emotional barriers. He always put his writing above his relationships. His amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, would write much later, “He loved his friends, but he was condemned by the law of his being to keep clear of any really entangling net of human affection and exaction. His contacts had to be subordinate, or indeed ancillary, to the vocation he had followed with a single passion.” In the coming years, James would write a series of stories that solidified that commitment as he also struggled to make sense of his intimacy with Woolson. She would accept it more easily for what it was—a bond of minds and hearts. The outer limits of their alliance were taking shape but perhaps not yet set. They would arrange visits whenever they could, but they would not marry, they would not live in the same apartment, and they would not have a physical relationship. But there was also a lot of gray area for the two dedicated writers to navigate up to those limits. Woolson must have seen what Edith Wharton would later recognize: he was “a solitary who could not live alone.” Wharton perceived “a deep central loneliness” as well as “a deep craving for recognition” in him.23 Not coincidentally, Woolson possessed those qualities as well. She and James were drawn to each other as two isolated, ambitious souls who feared being completely alone in the world. They both knew there was someone within reach (if only by letter or occasionally by train) who understood their need for connection and solitude.

  James recognized that Woolson was as devoted to her work as he was to his. Living below her apartment, he was aware of her steady work habits and admired her for them. Sometime in 1887 he gave her a volume of Shelley’s poetry inscribed to “Constance Woolson / from her friend and confrère.” With the French word confrère—colleague or comrade, the root of which is Latin for “brother”—he acknowledged her as a companion in the writing life and as a would-be sibling. Theirs was a chosen kinship. They both knew by now that the other would never marry. Marriage was, however, the only model they had for close relationships between men and women, and families were defined by blood. So they had to forge a new way to think about their intimacy. In later years Clare referred to him as “Cousin Henry,” signifying that he was viewed as a member of the family.24 To think of him as an uncle would have been to insinuate a marital relationship with her aunt. “Cousin,” however, kept the connection familial but vague.

  Constance and Henry’s time together at Bellosguardo ended in the middle of May, earlier than James had at first projected. Alice needed him back in London now that Katharine Loring was preparing to return to her family. Much as Alice and Katharine had created an extrafamilial, extramarital bond that was as close as, if not closer, than those they shared with their blood relatives, so too had Henry and Constance. Although they would never again live under the same roof, their relationship would remain strong for the rest of her life.

  BETRAYING MISS WOOLSON

  Despite their greater intimacy, however, the tensions between the two as writers remained. They resurfaced when, after James’s return to England, he put together a new volume of critical essays, titled Partial Portraits, for which he decided to revise “Miss Woolson.” He cut out the biographical paragraph (perhaps at her request) but also added some new criticisms of East Angels. Woolson always said she wanted candid assessments of her work, but these were hardly the constructive kind.

  In his revised version of the essay, which would appear in May 1888, James portrays Woolson as merely a woman writer, who is inherently incapable of writing to the same standard as men. In the new version, he opens with a fuller discussion of the prevalence of women writers: “Flooded as we have been in these latter days with copious discussion as to the admission of women to various offices, colleges, functions, and privileges, singularly little attention has been paid, by themselves at least, to the fact that in one highly important department of human affairs their cause is already gained—gained in such a way as to deprive them largely of their ground, formerly so substantial, for complaining of the intolerance of man.” Woolson’s story “At the Château of Corrine” certainly had complained of just that. (The story was finally published in October 1887.) To her, men’s contempt toward women such as herself had not dissipated, merely gone underground. As Ford tells Katharine Winthrop, men only pretended to appreciate women writers. James insisted, in a new passage added to the essay, “In America, in England, today, it is no longer a question of their admission into the world of literature: they are there in force; they have been admitted, with all the honors, on a perfectly equal footing. In America, at least, one feels tempted at moments to exclaim that they are in themselves the world of literature.”25 Surely he overstates his case.

  The real betrayal of his friend (much more serious than calling her “conservative” or belittling her portrayal of men’s continued intolerance toward women writers) came in a new paragraph, in which he now delineated East Angels’ “defects.” The most serious was a direct result of the author’s gender. “[I]t is characteristic of the feminine, as distinguished from the masculine hand,” James wrote, “that in any portrait of a corner of human affairs the particular effect produced in East Angels, that of what we used to call the love-story, will be the dominant one. . . . In novels by men other things are there to a greater or less degree, [but] in women’s, when they are of the category to which I allude, there are not but that one.”26 While love was not a particularly important subject for men, women seemed incapable of writing about anything else. James’s criticism brings to mind that of John Ford toward Katherine Winthrop’s poetry. Whether or not James read the story, he fulfilled Woolson’s prediction that underneath the polite criticism lingered a deep-seated distaste for women acting on their literary ambitions.

  Having worked so long for acceptance by male critics and peers, Woolson was probably disappointed but not surprised by James’s condescension. But considering that East Angels was in part a response to The Portrait of a Lady—which is almost entirely preoccupied with the question of marriage, although less so with love (for which she had criticized him)—she must have been stung by his comments. She had specifically faulted him for not showing his characters in love. Now he criticized her for showing little else, an unfair assessment, really, given the novel’s considerable attention to its Florida setting and analysis of character and social relations. The love story is never the sole theme of her novels.

  Woolson would have her revenge, but privately. She had recently written in her notebooks, “If a man is a critic like Lang, or Birrell, he will never appreciate or care for a love story. . . . But in spite of these gentlemen the great fact remains that nine-tenths of the great mass of readers care only for the love story.” Sometime around the time of James’s Partial Portraits essay, she also wrote out the idea for a tale, never written, of the female writer’s victory over the pompous male critics, not unlike the James-like characters in some of her stories:

  The case of Mrs. B., unable to read any tongue but her own, and having read herself but very little even in her own language—but who yet can produce works that touch all hearts—carry people away. A man of real critical talent (like [Matthew] Arnold) and the widest culture, thrown with such a gifted ignoramus. His wonder. At first, he simply despises her. But when he sees and hears
the great admiration her works excite, he is stupefied. He follows her about, and listens to her. She betrays her ignorance every time she opens her mouth. Yet she produces the creations that are utterly beyond him. Possibly he tries—having made vast preparations. And while he is studying and preparing, she has done it!27

  Woolson was no “ignoramus,” although she felt that her education had inadequately prepared her to compete with the likes of Arnold or James. Her fantasy of the success of Mrs. B. stupefying the male critics certainly had a personal element to it. She also understood that the fact of her success with the public remained a thorn in James’s side. What she didn’t add to her idea for this story is the envious male critic disparaging the woman writer’s works in print, reasserting his authority over the field of literature, as James had done.

  After Woolson’s death, James would read her notebooks, even borrowing a story idea from them.28 So he likely read about Mrs. B. Did he see a shadow of himself and Woolson there? If so, her triumph came too late. Still, she must have taken pride in the fact that she was the only living American author (and the only American besides Emerson) included in Partial Portraits. Howells, her chief adversary, was left out entirely.