Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  James’s letters to Boott suggest Woolson was successful at putting on a brave face. He wrote in March, “I mustn’t forget to tell you that Fenimore seems to have ‘take[n] root’ in the deadly Cheltenham. It helps her write lively novels. She tests well her staying power; & seems on the whole hearty enough.” Meanwhile, she told Boott that she and James lived in two very different worlds now. “With his enjoyment of the world and of society, you may imagine what he thinks of my life in Cheltenham! He comes down here once in a while, looks at the place, looks at me, shakes his head, & departs. I think a month here would really kill him.”42

  In the midst of much talk about James’s hopes of striking it rich in the theater—“the thirst for gold that is pushing me down this dishonorable path,” as he described it to a friend—Woolson began to receive insistent letters from a newspaper syndicate that was paying Frances Hodgson Burnett $5,000 a year for all she could write. Requests also came from two other syndicates, and the agent of another planned to visit her to make his case in person. She let him know he was not welcome. Everything she could write must go to the Harpers, to whom she continued to feel indebted.43 Her loyalty would cost her dearly, however.

  Such liberal offers and news of others’ prosperity—including the $10,000 Howells had earned from a syndicate for one novel—renewed her anxiety about her own financial situation. Her letters to Sam are filled with her worries and questions about her investments. She began to foresee a time when she would not be able to write anymore and wanted to begin putting aside money for her retirement. The youthfulness she had felt in Cairo was gone. When Boott complained to her of feeling his age, she responded pitifully, “But I’m older. There is nothing on earth so old as an old maid.” Her goal was to live frugally enough so that she could invest the money earned by her writing over the next five or ten years. The plan required her to produce a considerable amount. It was, she had told Sam, “Now or never!”44

  When the weather improved, Constance began taking walks in the countryside again and writing witty letters about the peculiar things she discovered, such as the tombstone that read, “Dear wife & children, pray Agree; / Quarrel no more. Then follow me.” She fancied the man writing his own epitaph in a house “where missiles were flying about!” “All is well here,” she told Sam in February. The discomforts of the winter had passed and she was working away in her “stodgy fairly-comfortable English sitting room” with a “gray English air outside.”45

  In May, Clara, Clare, and Kate returned to Europe and carried her off on excursions through southwestern England and Wales. James joined them for a day trip to Berkeley Castle near the Welsh border. Although her relatives tried to pull her away to Germany or Vienna, she felt that England, where it was easy to rent an apartment with a cook to provide private meals, was the best place for her to work. She dreaded most of all the common tables that were customary on the continent.46

  After her visitors left, Constance made a quick trip to Oxford in early July and rediscovered her fascination with its fairy-tale atmosphere. Here was a place both bucolic and invigorating that might prove to be the perfect place to write her next novel.

  14

  Oxford

  BY THE end of July 1891, Constance had settled into temporary rooms in Oxford on Beaumont Street near the Ashmolean Museum. One Sunday, soon after she unpacked, Dr. Baldwin came up from London to see her. Much of their talk was surely of Alice James. Baldwin had just seen her, at Constance’s suggestion, and diagnosed the tumor recently discovered in her breast as cancerous. Alice seemed relieved by the diagnosis, glad finally to have a reason to die. Acknowledging “her intense horror of life,” as Henry called it, those near to her could not be entirely pained by the news.1

  Henry, who was recuperating from a bad case of influenza in Ireland, was grateful to Baldwin and glad to hear of his visit to Woolson, writing, “[E]njoy Oxford freely & sweetly, & as the most hospitable woman in the world will help you to do.” At the end of the letter he added, “Will you kindly mention to Miss Woolson that I hope to stop & have a look at her on my way back to London? Therefore leave half a bottle of wine & the middle-age of a sofa cushion.” He expressed to Boott his delight at her choice of residence. He thought it “a very right & good place for her.” He didn’t mention the fact that it was much closer to London, and to him—a quick hour by train. He didn’t know about Woolson’s “Bellosguardo story,” he told Boott (“Dorothy” had not yet been published), but he would insist she send him a copy. He predicted that there would soon be “a good deal to show” for her “lonely industry” over the past year.2

  Soon Constance found rooms for the summer in a charming house for students just outside the gates of Oriel College, in the heart of old Oxford. She could see Corpus Christi and the Canterbury Gate to Christ Church from her windows. A sweet little bulldog named Oriel Bill, a resident of the house, visited her every evening and came along on her walks through the colleges’ gardens and meadows. A few years later the English Illustrated Magazine published an interview with Oriel Bill, in which he boasted, “I’ve distinguished acquaintances; one of the most intimate is a niece of Fenimore Cooper’s, Miss Fenimore Woolson; she’s putting me into a book just now.” She often fed him and allowed him to nap before her fire.3

  Oxford suited Constance perfectly. She could row on the Isis and Cherwell Rivers, where the presence of other women plying the oars made her feel less conspicuous. The town’s pastoral meadows and gardens gave her the peaceful landscapes she craved. Its history and architecture, not to mention its monastic atmosphere, appealed to the scholar in her. Although two women’s colleges had been founded in 1879, as the students began to return she realized how much the university town was “given over entirely to men and their belongings.”4 Nonetheless, she felt strangely at home among the students, Oxford providing the proper setting for her own solitary work.

  With the start of winter term in October, Constance found comfortable rooms in a Regency-era townhouse at 15 Beaumont Street, two doors from her first residence. Her flat on the top floor had a sitting room, dining room (with meals provided), bedroom, and small trunk room. Once she was settled in such agreeable lodgings, “all cheerful, and with big English coal fires,” she was content, writing to Sam, “I think I am in the right niche at last.”5

  After spending her days at her writing desk, she wandered the countryside, if the weather permitted, searching for the sites mentioned in two of her favorite Matthew Arnold poems, “The Scholar Gipsy” and “Thyrsis.” Then she would stop on her way home at Christ Church Cathedral for evensong, admiring the students in their angel-like white robes and sitting next to the organ to hear its thunderous chords. After walking home through the foggy streets she made tea in her Japanese teapot and wrote letters by the fire.6

  Oxford’s nearness to London also meant that she saw “more of life and the world,” and she soon found herself within James’s crowded orbit. When his play The American had its London premiere on September 26, she was in the audience, seated among the playwright’s friends and other distinguished guests. William James, in London to say goodbye to his dying sister, was also there. Constance was pleased to get a look at him, but they did not have a chance to talk in the crowded theater. She sat with Loring on one side and Henry’s friend, Wolcott Balestier, on the other. Balestier had just coauthored a novel with Rudyard Kipling and was a literary agent helping to bring American authors to a European audience. He was particularly kind to Woolson, pointing out the celebrities—John Singer Sargent, George Du Maurier, and others. Woolson did her best to fit in with the “splendor on all sides.” Presumably she again had difficulty hearing, but nonetheless she thought the play “a great success.” Reviews were mixed, however, and it wasn’t until the Prince of Wales made his appearance and James revised the play that ticket sales picked up. Woolson was loyal throughout. She attended at least five performances, causing James to exclaim to Baldwin, “[T]here’s friendship for you!”7

  The eveni
ng after the opening of the play, Woolson finally had the chance to meet William properly, presumably while she was visiting Alice or Henry. Even though he was only there for ten days, William also came to see her on the eve of his departure for America. Henry had not written much to William about Constance over the years, so it was probably Alice who conveyed to William and/or his wife her significance in their brother’s life. Constance wrote afterward that she thought William “perfectly delightful; so kind; so agreeable; so witty, so sympathetic.” She now wanted to read his book, The Principles of Psychology, published the year before.8

  Her trips to London and her new acquaintances reignited Constance’s desire for social interaction. In an effort to more fully engage with the world, she began to investigate some of the new hearing devices on the market. The most dramatic claims were being made for artificial eardrums, partly made of gold and tucked out of sight inside the ear canal. She decided to give them a try. Although the device was not expected to show results for six months to three years, she began to notice improvement very quickly. She was able to “hear a good deal” of an opera she saw in London with Clara and Clare, who were in England for a brief stay before returning home for the winter.9

  Back in Oxford, Constance received a call from Margaret Louisa Woods, wife of the president of Trinity College and the author of a well-received novel, A Village Tragedy, published in 1888. Woods, who was fifteen years younger than Woolson, was a friend of Rhoda Broughton’s and sought her out in hopes of finding a kindred spirit and mentor. Others would also be seeking her out, Woods informed Woolson, who wasn’t sure whether to be delighted or chagrined. “I like it, & I do’nt like it!” she explained to Boott. “I was born sociable & hospitable, & I ca’nt eradicate the traits. Yet I need all my time for other employments,” namely writing.10

  About this time Woolson also received a visit from Wolcott Balestier, who had been reading her works. He wanted to get to know the woman who “knew enough of the undercurrent of common American life” to create a “slangy, unpoetical, tobacco-chewing” male character in Jupiter Lights, the type of plain American he said most women writers avoided. He also wanted to publish the book in the English Library series, which he had started with William Heinemann. Other writers in the series included James, Howells, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Woolson was flattered by the attention. When Balestier died suddenly of typhoid fever in Germany a few months later, James was distraught and Woolson lost a potential ally in the literary world. Nonetheless, both Jupiter Lights and Anne were published in the English Library series.11

  AN INFERNAL WINTER

  Around Christmastime, James came up to see Woolson and reported to Baldwin in Florence, “[S]he clings to her antique Oxford & is very busy & contented, seemingly, & void of any offense save that of writing hours & hours on end & bringing on that horrid complaint in her arm & shoulder. But of this, she is incurable.”12 She had little choice, of course, if she was to save money for the future.

  As 1892 dawned, the idyll of Oxford turned into a nightmare. The Russian influenza pandemic was reaching the peak of its devastation in England. James had been ill with the flu the previous summer. Now the whole country seemed to be enveloped in a sinister black fog. “England has been like one continuous funeral,” she wrote to Baldwin. The death on January 14 of the Duke of Clarence, son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne, dispirited all of England. Constance likened the epidemic to “one of the Plagues of the Middle Ages.” Oxford was hit particularly hard. In January, the weekly death toll from the flu rose into the double digits. The start of term was postponed “for the first time in living memory.”13

  In early January, Constance fell very ill—not from influenza, she insisted, but from a cold that left her with a great pain in her head that a local doctor called “neurotic.” In other words, he thought it was in her mind. She thought her artificial eardrums were the culprits. The pain was “simply infernal,” she told Baldwin, whom she wished was nearby. One night, she thought she “should be mad, or dead, before morning.” As the stabbing sensation in her head receded, an unrelenting earache took its place and lasted at least four weeks. At times it felt like a knife was being thrust into her ear. There seemed to be “a slow gathering in the inner ear,” first on one side, then the other.14 She probably had acute ear infections.

  In those days before antibiotics, narcotics were the only available treatment. She didn’t think she could tolerate the pain much longer. She used a steaming kettle and linseed poultices to help clear her congestion, but they weren’t much help. She was descending again into hopelessness. Only relentless attempts at reading and taking sleeping draughts sustained her. Such medications were usually derived from opium. Knowing how addictive they were, she asked Baldwin if he could send her a prescription for one that wasn’t harmful.15

  Constance was hardly in a state to receive visitors, but her friend Eleanor Poynter came up from London against her wishes. Poynter found the curtains closed and Constance lying on the sofa with her head wrapped up, unable to hear or talk due to the pain. Poynter proved herself a true friend and wrote on a slate to communicate. That afternoon a telegram from Henry James arrived with news of Rudyard Kipling’s sudden marriage (against his family’s wishes) to Balestier’s sister. Woolson shared it with Poynter, who was related to Kipling and wrote on the slate, “I am flabbergasted!”16

  During Constance’s long illness, her landlady, Mrs. Phillips, became her friend and nurse. She kept the fire going, even creeping into Constance’s room at night. Mrs. Phillips had “a great admiration for literature” and said she felt privileged to be able to help Constance complete her book. Knowing that such care was hard to find, Constance decided to stay in Oxford until her novel was finished.17

  Nonetheless, she yearned more than ever for a home of her own. She wrote to Boott that she wished they and his family could have lived on at Bellosguardo. She imagined him composing songs and going to Paris every year and Frank and Lizzie painting, while the baby grew up “a beautiful Florentine” and she happily lived out her days at the Villa Brichieri with the little dog Pax.18

  The pain in her ears, which lasted for six weeks, was, she told Boott, “very depressing. . . . But there is worse suffering all about me & I must not complain too much. Alice James, for instance; hers is one long martyrdom.” From her deathbed Alice continued to send Constance clever missives, in spite of her growing pain. “If she had any health, what a brilliant woman she would have been,” she mused. Although none of their final correspondence has survived, it is clear they had a great admiration for each other to the end.19

  After spending most of her adulthood in pain and wanting her life to end, Alice James died on March 6, 1892. The final lines in her diary were about Loring reading to her Woolson’s story “Dorothy,” which had appeared in that month’s Harper’s.20 It was an appropriate way for Constance and Alice to say farewell to each other, given the story’s themes. They both understood what the doctors did not.

  Alice James shortly before her death.

  (James Family Papers, MS Am 1094.5 [52], by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Constance was glad to learn that Alice’s suffering had ended, convinced that she had found her way to a better place. She, however, remained in this world, fighting to keep body and mind intact. With the failure of her experiment with artificial eardrums, she feared she would have to resign herself to silence and the small group of friends likely to make an effort to talk into her ear trumpet. Henry, who would always take the trouble, came to see Constance a week after Alice’s funeral to tell her about his sister’s final days. Constance must have been particularly interested in the dream Alice had shortly before her death of Lizzie Boott and another friend from their Cambridge days heading out to sea in a boat and looking back at her.21

  Sometime before she died, Alice left a touching final message for Constance. Its contents are a mystery, but it was sensiti
ve enough that Constance later regretted mentioning it to Sam during his brief visit to her in Oxford the following year. She had spoken without thinking “whether it was safe or not, wise or not, prudent or not.” The message very likely concerned her and Henry’s relationship. At least one of his biographers believes that Alice’s message was intended to “resign her brother to Fenimore’s care. Expert in grief, infinite in charity, Fenimore might take on the ‘griefs, or aches or disappointments’ of her brother’s life.”22 Given Constance’s discomfort about revealing the message to Sam, it seems quite possible that Alice had given her blessing for some kind of union between Constance and Henry. She might have wished to bring them together, hoping they could find the support and comfort she and Katharine had found in each other.

  The hole Alice’s death left in Henry’s life would not be filled easily. After the funeral he wrote to Boott that “she contributed constantly, infinitely to the interest, the consolation, as it were, in disappointment and depression, of my own existence.”23 After Alice’s death and Constance’s recovery, Henry’s visits to Oxford became more frequent. They had reached a new stage in their friendship, but it remained to be seen what form it would take.