Constance Fenimore Woolson
Page 35
Family and friends also offered their assistance with childcare over the years, giving me the gift of time in which to write. I want to particularly thank my mother, Beverly Rude, and my good friend Catherine Michna, who were more than generous.
I am immensely grateful to my agent, Barbara Braun, for having faith in this project and finding such a splendid home for it. To my editor at Norton, Amy Cherry, I owe more than I can say, from her championing of the project to her invaluable advice on the manuscript, and ultimately her belief in both me and Woolson. I can’t imagine a better editor to have worked with on this project so close to my heart. Remy Cawley, editorial assistant at Norton, was a dream to work with. She answered my never-ending queries about manuscript preparation and production so promptly and patiently that she deserves some kind of award. Nancy Green did a tremendous job copyediting, saving me from many errors.
Paul, Emma, Merlin, and Fritzie, you are “my true country, my real home.” Thank you for providing the love and ballast in my life that I wish Woolson could have had in hers.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the notes.
PEOPLE
ACW Arabella Carter Washburn
CFW Constance Fenimore Woolson
CRB Clare Rathbone Benedict, CFW’s niece
CWB Clara Woolson Benedict, CFW’s sister
ECS Edmund Clarence Stedman
FB Francis Boott
HJ Henry James
HW Hannah Pomeroy Woolson, CFW’s mother
JH John Hay
KM Katharine Mather, CFW’s niece
PHH Paul Hamilton Hayne
SM Samuel Mather, CFW’s nephew
WDH William Dean Howells
WWB Dr. William Wilberforce Baldwin
WORKS
Benedict I Clare Benedict, ed., Voices Out of the Past, vol. 1 of Five Generations (1785–1923) (London: Ellis, 1929).
Benedict II Clare Benedict, ed., Constance Fenimore Woolson, vol. 2 of Five Generations (1785–1923), 2nd ed. (London: Ellis, 1932).
Benedict III Clare Benedict, ed., The Benedicts Abroad, vol. 3 of Five Generations (1785–1923) (London: Ellis, 1930).
CL The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, ed. Sharon L. Dean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).
Harper’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
HJL Henry James Letters, 4 vols., ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–1984).
REPOSITORIES
BHS The Loring Collection, Beverly Historical Society, Beverly, MA.
Brown The John Hay Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.
Columbia Edmund Clarence Stedman Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Cornell Daniel Willard Fiske Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections, The Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. (The cited letters are undated. I have provided the appropriate years whenever possible.)
Dartmouth Curtis Family Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
McGill Edel Papers, McLennan Library, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Pierpont Morgan William Wilberforce Baldwin Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.
Rollins The Clare Benedict Collection of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL.
University of Basel English Department, University of Basel, Switzerland.
UVA The Papers of Henry James, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
WRHS Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH.
A full bibliography of CFW’s publications as well as criticism on her work can be found at http://constancefenimorewoolson.wordpress.com/.
PROLOGUE: Portraits
1. Examples are too numerous to mention. Sheldon M. Novick’s comment in a footnote to his retelling of the story of HJ’s drowning of CFW’s dresses in Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 554, indicates its pervasiveness: “I have not found confirmation of this improbable story, but as it has become canonical I include it here.”
2. Copy of The Portrait of a Lady at University of Basel. CFW to Flora Payne [Whitney], [1863/1864?], CL, 2.
3. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; rev. ed. 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 64.
4. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 188. The latter is CFW’s description of Isabel.
5. HJ, The Portrait of a Lady, 362.
6. CFW to HJ, Feb. 12, [1882], CL, 190.
CHAPTER 1: A Daughter’s Country
1. Clara, who would be born after Constance, wrote that their mother “never could talk about those days,” Benedict I, 42.
2. Benedict I, 42.
3. Benedict I, 164. Benedict III, 11.
4. CFW to O. F. R. Waite, Aug. 15, 1892, CL, 485.
5. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 94–101. Maurice Joblin, Cleveland Past and Present: Its Representative Men (Cleveland, OH: Maurice Joblin, 1869), 400–402. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 304.
6. O. F. R. Waite, History of the Town of Claremont, New Hampshire (Manchester, NH: John B. Clarke Company, 1895), 498–99. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74. Benedict I, 127. CFW, “The Bones of Our Ancestors,” Harper’s 47 (Sept. 1873): 535–43.
7. Richard Cooper to James Fenimore Cooper, Aug. 2, 1831, Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Fenimore Cooper (grandson), vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 236.
8. “We have never had any likeness of him which was satisfactory,” CFW wrote to O. F. R. Waite, Aug. 15, 1892, CL, 484. “Death of Chas. J. Woolson,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Aug. 6, 1869. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Cooper, Apr. 5, 1847, Cooper family. Benedict I, 100, 107.
9. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 151.
10. Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 315–16, 330–34.
11. James Fenimore Cooper to HW, Apr. 19, 1840, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Beard, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 29–30.
12. Fenimore was CFW’s great-grandmother’s maiden name. James added it to his name legally in 1826, having promised his mother to carry on the name, which would have otherwise died out.
13. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 375. Benedict I, 17.
14. Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 301, 304–5, 308.
15. Hannah Pomeroy [Woolson] to William Cooper, Oct. 18, 1828, James Fenimore Cooper Collection, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
16. Ibid.
17. Benedict I, 158–60, 148–49.
18. The 1850 census shows three Irish servants living in the Woolson household, and the 1860 census two German “domestics.” CFW was “carefully instructed” in domestic arts, she wrote to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 420.
19. Benedict I, 161. Benedict III, 215, 511. CWB to KM, July 26, 1905, typescript, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Levi Crosby Turner, “Auto-Biographic,” Diaries of Levi Crosby Turner, Research Library, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY.
21. Turner, “Auto-Biographic,” 18. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Cooper, Mar. 15, 1847, Cooper family. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 98.
22. HW, Journal, Benedict I, 167–214.
23. Benedict I, 42; ellipses in original. Cornelia E. L. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Connie Anderson, great-great-niece of CFW.
24. CFW to JH, Dec. 26, [1885], CL, 303. Notes in CFW’s copy of James R
ussell Lowell, My Study Windows (Boston: Houghton, 1886), 19, Rollins. CFW to SM, Feb. 27, [1889], CL, 367. CFW, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s 45 (Sept. 1872): 520.
25. CFW, “The South Shore of Lake Erie,” Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 526. Anthony Trollope, North America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 158. John Fiske quoted in William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World, 1950), 304. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson.”
26. Joblin, Cleveland Past and Present, 385. George Quartus Pomeroy made Jarvis an “innocent victim of a long series of frauds and deceptions,” according to “Forgery, &c.,” The Cleveland Herald, May 5, 1845. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, July 31, 1851, Cooper Family.
27. CFW, “Charles Jarvis Woolson,” Benedict I, 97. CFW to H. H. Boyesen, Aug. 9, [1881?], CL, 171.
28. Oliver Payne, the brother of her friend Flora Payne; Zephaniah Swift Spalding; and Samuel Livingston Mather.
CHAPTER 2: Lessons in Literature, Life, and Death
1. Benedict I, 165–66. “Died,” The Cleveland Herald, Jan. 31, 1846.
2. Benedict I, 166.
3. Benedict II, 16. Quotes from Hannah in Benedict I, 166.
4. Mrs. W. A. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, Philanthropic, Educational, Literary, Medical and Artistic (Cleveland: W. A. Ingham, 1893), 270. Benedict I, 64.
5. Benedict II, xiv. CRB to Leon Edel, July 23, [1953], McGill. CFW to Harriet Benedict Sherman, [1881?], CL, 180. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, 271. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days, Her Home There and Her Friends,” New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1889, p. 11. The close friend interviewed was probably Arabella Carter.
6. CFW to Mary Gale Carter Clarke, July 24, [1884], CL, 284.
7. Benedict II, xv. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.” Sarah D. Hobart, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Advance 18 (Oct. 18, 1883): 684.
8. Benedict II, xv. CFW to KM, Dec. 27, [1892], CL, 494. CFW to ECS, Sept. 28, [1874], CL, 18. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 54.
9. The parlor’s description is taken from Anne March [CFW], The Old Stone House (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1873), 64. She used her family’s home, the former Irad Kelley mansion on Euclid Avenue, as a model, according to J. H. A. Bone, “With and Without Glasses,” Feb. 11, 1894, p. 8, and Cornelia E. L. May, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Connie Anderson, great-great-niece of CFW. C. A. Urann, Centennial History of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1896), 62–63. CFW, “The Editor’s Sanctum,” ch. 3, The Old Stone House.
10. George Pomeroy Keese, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown, NY), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3. Georgiana’s poem, Benedict I, 75. Hannah’s journal, Benedict I, 167–214. Georgiana’s journal, Benedict I, 78–84.
11. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.”
12. “Notices of Publications Received,” The Ohio Cultivator (Columbus) 9 (April 15, 1855): 120. Grannis quoted in Edward A. Roberts, Official Report of the Centennial Celebration of the Founding of Cleveland and the Settlement of the Western Reserve (Cleveland: Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1896), 185. “Mrs. Arey’s Poems,” Western Literary Messenger 24 (May 1855): 122.
13. “Editorial Notes—American Literature,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 3 (Feb. 1854): 222. Hawthorne quoted in the Introduction to Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), xv.
14. Woolson family volume of Harper’s in Clare Benedict Collection, WRHS. Mrs. C. S. Hall, “Memories of Miss Jane Porter,” Harper’s 1 (Sept. 1850): 433.
15. CFW to ECS, July 23, [1876], CL, 74. CFW, The Old Stone House, 378.
16. Benedict I, 97. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441. Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work, 271.
17. Benedict I, 67. CFW, The Old Stone House, 163.
18. C. Jarvis Woolson to W. H. Averell, Benedict I, 67.
19. C. Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, July 31, 1851, Cooper Family. Georgiana Woolson Mather to Mrs. Thomas Mather, Aug. 30, 1851, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Typo in obituary of Rev. Lawson Carter, New York Times, July 16, 1868. HW, “A Ghost Story,” Benedict I, 220. See also Emma Woolson Carter to “Louisa,” Mar. 15, 1852, Benedict I, 68–69.
21. Benedict I, 68. CFW to “Louisa,” n.d., CL, 1. Although Sharon Dean dates this letter in the 1840s, it must have been written when Emma came home after her husband’s death. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
22. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2011), 31–33. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 16–17.
23. Terry S. Reynolds, Iron Will: Cleveland Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847–2006 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 4. Hannah Peabody Chandler Woolson to CFW, n.d., CL, 565. Benedict I, 71.
24. Poem in Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Georgiana Woolson Mather to Samuel Livingston Mather, July 3, 1853, Benedict I, 85–87. Benedict I, 71.
25. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 107.
26. CFW to SM, Feb. 24, [1877?], CL, 89.
27. Charles Jarvis Woolson to Richard Fenimore Cooper, Feb. 13, 1846, and Mar. 5, 1850, Cooper Family. Clara’s description of her mother is in the thinly veiled portrait of Mrs. Barstow in her pseudonymous novel, Agnes Phelps, One Year at Boarding-School (Boston: Loring, 1873), 10.
28. Michael J. McTighe, A Measure of Success: Protestants and Public Culture in Antebellum Cleveland (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 30. CFW, The Old Stone House, 230–31.
29. “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Her Early Cleveland Days.”
30. CFW, The Old Stone House, 211–12, 38.
31. CFW to Samuel Mather, Oct. 31, 1890, CL, 425. CFW to FB, Mar. 4, [1889], Duveneck Family.
32. Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 39.
33. CFW, The Old Stone House, 254.
CHAPTER 3: Turning Points
1. Letter to the Editor, “Rockwell St. School Examinations, &c.,” The Cleveland Herald, Mar. 17, 1853.
2. Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, ed., Emma Willard and Her Pupils; or, Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872 (New York: Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898), 92. Circular and Catalogue of the Albany Female Academy. 1848 (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1848). Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 3–25.
3. First Annual Catalogue of the Cleveland Female Seminary, Cleveland, Ohio 1854–1855 (Cleveland: Sanford & Hayward’s, 1855), 15. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421. CFW to Linda Guilford, [1891], CL, 464.
4. CFW to Katharine Loring, Sept. 19, [1890], CL, 421.
5. Linda T. Guilford, “The Teacher’s Disappointments,” The Ohio Educational Monthly. A Journal of School and Home Education, new ser., vol. 1 (1860): 200. Linda Thayer Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, From 1848 to 1881 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1890), 74.
6. CFW to Linda Guilford, Mar. 1, [1887] and [1891], CL, 336, 464. Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, 76–77.
7. Guilford, The Story of a Cleveland School, 77–78. CFW to PHH, [April 17, 1876], CL, 67. CFW to Linda Guilford, Mar. 1, [1887], CL, 336.
8. CFW to William Whitney, Feb. 25, [1893], CL, 502.
9. Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 37–44.
10. Julia Gardiner quoted in Van R. Baker, ed., The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836–1853 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2000), 13. CFW, Anne (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 151, 157. CFW used Madame Ch
egaray’s as the model for Madame Moreau’s school in Anne.
11. CFW to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Aug. 9, [1881?], CL, 171. CFW to PHH, All-Saints Day, [1875], CL, 56.
12. CFW, “The Bones of Our Ancestors,” Harper’s 47 (Sept. 1873): 535–43. CFW, Anne, 154, 155.
13. CFW, Anne, 157. Benedict I, 292.
14. Benedict I, 292.
15. Benedict III, 518.
16. CFW to Flora Payne, [1863/64], CL, 2.
17. David Van Tassel, “Behind Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2006), 19, 28–32. The Woolsons lived at 288 Prospect St., and Lucy Bagby at 151. “Mr. Lincoln’s Reception,” Cleveland Morning Leader, Feb. 14, 1861, p. 1.
18. CFW, Anne, 353–54.
19. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441.
20. CFW, “The Ancient City,” pt. 1, Harper’s 50 (Dec. 1874): 9.
21. Anne March [CFW], The Old Stone House (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1873), 139.
22. Sebastian Hubert Lukasik, “Military Service, Combat, and American Identity in the Progressive Era” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008), 84. Annals of Cleveland, vol. 44, 1861 (Cleveland: WPA Project, 1938), 131. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535.
23. David Stephen Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 1744. CFW to PHH, July 23, [1875], CL, 48. “The March of the Seventh—Letter from a Cleveland Boy,” Cleveland Morning Leader, May 4, 1861, p. 2.
24. CFW to SM, Jan. 21, 1891, CL, 441. CFW, “A Flower of the Snow,” The Galaxy 27 (Jan. 1874): 77, 78. In a letter to SM, Dec. 10, 1893, CL, 535, CFW indicated that she and Zeph had planned to marry. She imagined that if they met again each would think, “Great heavens—what an escape I had!”
25. CFW to ECS, Oct. 1, [1876], Columbia. Concert program in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Sept. 21, 1861, p. 3. CFW to ECS, July 8, [1877], CL, 94. Mary Clark Brayton and Ellen F. Terry, Our Acre and Its Harvest: Historical Sketch of the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, 1869), 285. CFW, “A Merry Christmas,” Harper’s 44 (Jan. 1872): 234.