50. CFW to SM, Mar. 14, [1893], CL, 505. CFW to FB, Mar. 14, [1893], Duveneck Family.
51. CFW to unknown recipient, 1893, CL, 510. CFW to KM, June 12, 1890, CL, 415.
52. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512. CFW to FB, Mar. 14, [1893], Duveneck Family.
53. CFW to SM, Apr. 29, [1893], CL, 512.
54. CFW to Rebekah Owen, May 9, [1893], CL, 513.
55. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 513. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517.
56. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 515.
CHAPTER 15: The Riddle of Existence
1. CFW to Winifred Howells, May 11, 1883, CL, 253. CFW to HJ, May 7, 1883, CL, 246. CFW to Flora Mather, July 1, 1893, CL, 516. The Casa Biondetti is near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.
2. CFW, “Lagoons,” Benedict II, 393–99. Ellipses in original.
3. CFW to Flora Mather, July 1, 1893, CL, 516.
4. CFW to FB, Sept. 9, [1893], Duveneck Family.
5. CFW to KM, July 2, 1893, CL, 517–18.
6. HJ, “The Grand Canal,” [Nov. 1892], in Italian Hours (New York: Penguin, 1992), 33. CFW to WWB, July 20, [1893], CL, 518. HJ to William James, Mar. 24, [1894], HJL3, 470.
7. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514. Linda Simon, “Diagnosing the Physician: Patients’ Evaluation of Nineteenth Century Medical Therapeutics,” in Revue Angliciste de l’Université de la Réunion, Alizes/Trade Winds (Automne 2003), http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/352.html. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” (1901), in From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization, ed. Greg Eghigian (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 207–23.
8. CFW to WWB, June 16, [1893], CL, 514.
9. Simon, in “Diagnosing the Physician,” writes, “Baldwin, unlike other physicians, affirmed his patients’ experience that depression and fatigue often resulted from organic illness, and that pain, whatever its cause, was real.” CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. Daniel Tuke, A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1892), 688. Some medical scientists continue to look for a link between influenza and depression; see Olaoluwa Okusaga et al., “Association of Seropositivity for Influenza and Coronaviruses with History of Mood Disorders and Suicide Attempts,” Journal of Affective Disorders 130 (2011): 220–25. F. B. Smith, “The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894,” Social History of Medicine 8, no. 1 (1995): 71. HJ to Ariana Curtis, [June 21, 1894], Dartmouth.
10. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 520. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1893], CL, 526. CFW to unknown recipient, Oct. 14, [1893], CL, 524.
11. CFW to KM, Aug. 20, 1893, CL, 521. Ruskin quoted in Stephen Kite, Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 115. Ruskin’s drawings and notes of the Palazzo Orio, as it was then called, are on p. 112.
12. CFW to FB, Sept. 9, [1893], Duveneck Family.
13. The painting by Ricciardo Meacci today hangs in Lamb House, Rye, England, the final home of HJ. He had originally given CFW the painting and CWB gave it back to him after her death. Although CWB later asked for it back, the painting was returned to Lamb House, presumably after CWB’s death. The painting as well as notes pasted on the back, one in CFW’s hand, are viewable at http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/204158.
14. HJ to Ariana Curtis, July 14, [1893], HJL3, 420. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 544. HJ to Ariana Curtis, Sept. 19, [1893], quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 348.
15. CFW to CRB, Dec. 3, [1893], CL, 533. CFW to SM, Oct. 31, [1893], CL, 527.
16. Julian Norwich, Paradise of Cities: Venice in the 19th Century (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 247–48. HJ quoted in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Introduction, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James (London: Pushkin Press, 1998), 25. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 543.
17. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 528–29.
18. Ibid., 529.
19. CFW, “A Transplanted Boy,” in Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 120, 121.
20. Unpublished Curtis diary for 1893, private collection. HJ to FB, Oct. 21, 1893, HJL3, 37.
21. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 529. CFW to Zina Hulton, Nov. 15, [1893], Hulton Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
22. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], CL, 539. CFW to SM, Nov. 20, 1893, CL, 528.
23. HJ to WWB, Nov. 10, 1893, Pierpont Morgan.
24. CFW to SM, Nov. 23, [1893], CL, 530. CFW to SM, Dec. 10, [1893], CL, 534.
25. CFW to SM, Dec. 20, [1893], CL, 543.
26. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], 537–38.
27. Ibid., 536, 538.
28. CFW to WWB, Dec. 17, [1893], CL, 541. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], 537.
29. CFW to WWB, Dec. 17, [1893], CL, 541. CFW, Notebook, Rollins.
30. CFW, “Reflections,” Rollins. This is written on a scrap of paper, presumably from a different notebook than that in which she kept her notes on the lagoons. The passage is also printed in Benedict II, 411, with some slight modification. It does not end with a period, and, in fact, it may have continued on another page that has not survived.
31. CFW to KM, Dec. 25, [1893], CL, 540. CFW to ACW, Dec. 25, [1893], CL, 545; ellipses in original.
32. HJ to Katherine Bronson, Dec. 31, 1893, quoted in Edel, The Middle Years, 356. HJ to Daniel Curtis, Dec. 27, 1893, Dartmouth.
33. Henry Mills Alden, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Weekly 38 (Feb. 3, 1894): 113.
34. CFW to KM, Dec. 25, [1894], CL, 440. Lady Layard’s Journal, The Brownings: A Research Guide, http://www.browningguide.org/browningscircle.php. CFW to SM, Dec. 21, [1893], CL, 544. Lady Layard’s Journal makes many mentions of Zina Hulton, the Bronsons, and the princess, whom she calls Olga, during these first weeks of the new year. Olga would later report to Lady Layard what she learned of CFW’s death.
35. Dr. Cini is identified as “head physician of the hospital” in an article about Woolson’s death, “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894. Lyndall Gordon, in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), spells his name Chene, as it would be pronounced, which is how Grace Carter, who did not know him, spelled it. Lady Layard, who knew him well, spelled it Cini. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 571. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. This letter is incorrectly dated as [2-4-1894]. The correct date appears at the end of the letter, after the signature. CFW to Harper & Brothers, Jan. 17, 1894, CL, 546.
36. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 572.
37. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 572. CFW’s words reported by Holas. CFW’s vomiting has been interpreted by Gordon, in A Private Life, as evidence that she was trying to poison herself “under the cover of supposed flu,” 273–74. However, the presence of fever indicates illness, and the fact that CFW left no will shows a lack of premeditation to kill herself. Lady Layard recorded in her journal on Jan. 19, [1984], “There is a great deal of influenza about.” Associations of green bile with ill temper, etc., in the entry for bile, in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989). Possible causes of CFW’s symptoms identified in Joan Weimer, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak (New York: Random House, 1994), 264, and independently confirmed in discussion with Dr. Eva Lizer.
38. CFW to KM, Dec. 13, [1893], CL, 537.
39. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573.
40. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573.
41. HJ to WWB, Jan. 26 [1894], HJL3, 457.
42. My reading of CFW’s final days differs from that of Gordon, in A Private Life, who sees CFW as calmly preparing for and planning her suicide over many days (274–76).
Lady Layard’s Journal, Jan. 28, [1984]. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
43. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Lady Layard’s Journal, Mar. 7, [1894].
44. Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: Thomas Dunne, St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 49. Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 57–59. Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 308.
45. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 573. “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, translated by Edoarda Grego.
46. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 232. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. CFW’s bell is at Rollins.
47. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. According to Lady Layard’s Journal, Jan. 28 [1894], CFW requested a cup that was holding flowers and would thus require washing. No one knows for sure what happened after the nurse left the room. There are conflicting accounts of the window she may have jumped or fallen from. Gordon, in A Private Life, correctly identifies the room as “overlooking the calle” but indicates that the sill of CFW’s bedroom window was too high for her to have fallen out of it accidentally (276). However, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has taken for me pictures of the windows in what must have been Woolson’s bedroom, as it is the only room facing the calle that was then in existence. (An addition was made in the twentieth century.) These pictures show that the sills were about two feet above the floor, indicating that CFW easily could have fallen out of one of the windows. In fact, today there are bars over the bottom portion of the windows to prevent anyone from falling or jumping out of them again. In any event, because no one was in the room with CFW and no description of the windows as they were then has survived, we cannot definitively know if she fell or jumped deliberately.
CHAPTER 16: Aftershocks
1. “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, and “Suicide,” La Gazzetta di Venezia, Jan. 25, 1894, both translated by Edoarda Grego. “Miss Woolson’s Fate,” The Buffalo (NY) Express, Feb. 16, 1894, a translation by Kate Field of a Jan. 25 story in the paper La Venezia. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
2. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
3. JH to SM, Jan. 31, 1894; Clara Hay to Flora Stone Mather, Jan. 31, 1894; JH to SM, Mar. 2, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
4. For initial U.S. reports, see, as a sampling: “A Favorite Writer Dead,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 3; “Death of Constance F. Woolson,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 2; “Mrs. [sic] Woolson, the Novelist, Dead,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 26, 1894, p. 1. In Venice, the following stories ran: “The Suicide of an American Lady,” Il Gazzettino (Venice), Jan. 25, 1894, and “Suicide,” La Gazzetta di Venezia, Jan. 25, 1894; quote from the latter, translated by Edoarda Grego. “Suicide of a Lady Novelist,” The Standard (London), Jan. 27, 1894, p. 5. For reprints of this report in the United States, see, as a sampling: “Says Miss Woolson Was a Suicide,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 8; “Miss Woolson Committed Suicide,” The Sun (Baltimore), Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1; “Suicide of an American Authoress,” Omaha Daily Bee, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1; and “Jumped from a Window,” Idaho Daily Statesman, Jan. 27, 1894, p. 1.
5. Grace Carter to SM, Jan. 27, 1894, Mather Family Papers, WRHS. Telegram, presumably from Grace (not signed), presumably to SM (addressed to Mather Hotel, Windsor, NY), microform, Constance Fenimore Woolson Papers, WRHS. Only a few papers ran the story; see, for instance: “MISS WOOLSON NOT A SUICIDE: She Fell from Her Window While Wandering About in Delirium,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1894, p. 3; The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown), Feb. 1, 1894, p. 3; “Not a Case of Suicide,” (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, Jan. 29, 1894, p. 10; “Prominent Personals,” Vermont Phoenix, Feb. 9, 1894, p. 3. R. J. Nevin to Anna Grace Carter, Feb. 7, 1894, Henry James Papers, University of Virginia.
6. Marie Holas to SM, Jan. 31, 1894, CL, 574. Lady Layard’s Journal, Mar. 7 and Apr. 3, [1894].
7. Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 93.
8. “Death is not terrible to me,” CFW wrote to HJ, Feb. 23, [1882], CL, 191. “To me it is only a release; & if, at any time, you should hear that I had died, always be sure that I was quite willing, & even glad, to go.” Jamison explains in Night Falls Fast that many suicides are neither simply “long-considered” or sudden but “both: a brash moment of action taken during a span of settled and suicidal hopelessness” (198).
9. HJ to Anna Grace Carter, Jan. 26, [1894], Henry James Papers, UVA, 6251 (Box 2:73). HJ to WWB, Jan. 26, [1894], HJL3, 457.
10. Some of HJ’s letters in which he discusses CFW’s death can be found in HJL3, 457–71. Lyndall Gordon discusses the letters HJ wrote in A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 279–80. Clipping from the New York Herald in Mather family scrapbook. Much else in this article, which suggests that HJ remained unmarried because his heart was buried in CFW’s grave, is erroneous. But it is interesting that the family kept the clipping. It was one of the few verifications in print of their close tie. I have been unable to locate the original.
11. HJ to WWB, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 464.
12. Quoted in Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 213.
13. HJ to FB, Jan. 31, [1894], HJL3, 463. HJ to JH, Jan. 28, 1894, John Hay Collection, Brown. HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 465–66. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 52.
14. HJ to FB, Jan. 31, [1894], HJL3, 463; HJ to WWB, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 464; HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, Feb. 2, 1894, HJL3, 465. HJ to William James, Mar, 24, [1894], HJL3, 470.
15. HJ to Katherine de Kay Bronson, HJL3, 467.
16. Leon Edel posed the question in The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962): “Had her act been a partial consequence of frustration—of frustrated love for Henry?” (363). More recently, Gordon, in A Private Life, has imagined James asking, “What if Fenimore had killed herself because of him?” (289). But there is no evidence that she killed herself because of unrequited love for HJ or separation from HJ.
17. CRB to Leon Edel, Nov. 27, 1947, McGill. Edel, The Middle Years, 367–68.
18. Benedict III, 4–5; ellipses in original.
19. CWB to SM, May 2, [1894], Mather Family Papers, WRHS.
20. Zina Hulton, “Fifty Years in Venice,” typescript, p. 130, Hulton Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Scraps and notes from CFW published in Benedict II. Anecdote by Mercede Huntington, “Recollections of Henry James in His Later Years,” a transcription of interviews done by the BBC in 1956, Houghton, MS Eng 1213.4(20).
21. HJ to WWB, [May 27, 1894], Pierpont Morgan. HJ to CRB, Sept. 13, [1907], HJL4, 460.
22. Benedict III, 4. CFW to WWB, July 20, [1893], CL, 518. HJ, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 98.
23. Benedict II, 144–45.
24. HJ, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in Selected Tales (New York: Penguin, 2001), 432.
25. Ibid., 436, 437.
26. Ibid., 443, 445.
27. Ibid., 446, 449.
28. Ibid., 454, 456.
29. Ibid., 459–60, 461.
30. HJ to Grace Carter, June 7, 1900, Henry James Papers, UVA, 6251 (Box 8:83).
31. HJ to unknown recipient, Jan. 29, 1894, Edel Papers, McGill. Note at the end by a researcher indicates that the proper date of the letter is Jan. 29, 1914, and another note indicates that this was “the date of Fenimore’s death.” It w
as close—Jan. 24 was the real date.
EPILOGUE: Remembrance
1. M.H., Letter to Editor, New York Times Saturday Review of Books, June 2, 1906, p. BR358.
2. See for instance, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Brooklyn Eagle, Jan. 25, 1894, p. 4; Margaret Sangster, “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Harper’s Bazar 27 (Feb. 3, 1894): 93; “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” The Critic 21 (Feb. 3, 1894): 73; “Books and Authors,” The Graphic (Chicago) (Feb. 10, 1894): 120; and “Editorial,” Godey’s Magazine 128 (Mar. 1894): 366. The Mather family scrapbook contains many more examples in (often unidentified) clippings. ECS quoted in “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” New York Tribune, Jan. 28, 1894, p. 14.
3. “Our London Correspondence,” Glasgow Herald, Jan. 30, 1894. The Illustrated London News, Feb. 3, 1894, p. 135.
4. Charles Dudley Warner, “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s 88 (May 1894): 967.
5. “Comment on New Books,” Atlantic Monthly 73 (May 1894): 705. “Fiction New and Old,” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Mar. 11, 1894, p. 4. “Horace Chase,” The Critic 24 (Apr. 21, 1894): 270. “Recent Fiction,” The Interior 25 (Apr. 26, 1894): 536.
6. Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: The Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1987), xvi.
7. Benedict III, 603. John Hervey, “Sympathetic Art,” The Saturday Review of Art, Oct. 12, 1929; reprinted in Benedict II, 559.
8. See Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
9. Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870 (New York: Century, 1915); John Dwight Kern, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934); Lyon N. Richardson, “Constance Fenimore Woolson, ‘Novelist Laureate’ of America,” South Atlantic Quarterly 39 (Jan. 1940): 20–36.
10. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 203. See his many letters to Clare Benedict in Edel Papers, McGill. Rayburn Moore’s important academic study of CFW was also published at this time: Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York, Twayne, 1963).
Constance Fenimore Woolson Page 40