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Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist
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"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism


Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature.


Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson's dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family's ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father's death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward.


Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother's death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton's work of the next generation.


In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson's character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.

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Street Date:
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Language:
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ISBN:
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APA Citation (style guide)

Anne Boyd Rioux. (2016). Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. W. W. Norton & Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Anne Boyd Rioux. 2016. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. W. W. Norton & Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Anne Boyd Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Anne Boyd Rioux. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, and the editor of Woolson's Miss Grief and Other Stories. Rioux has received two National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, one for public scholarship, and lives in New Orleans.
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"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature.

Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson's dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family's ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father's death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward.

Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother's death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton's work of the next generation.

In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson's character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Sandra Gilbert, coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
      • content: Anne Boyd Rioux's new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson is a riveting portrait of a lady whose literary reputation has been undeservedly eclipsed until quite recently. A best-selling nineteenth-century American novelist, friend of countless intellectuals (including Henry James and others in his circle), and intrepid traveler, the stubbornly independent Woolson was compared in her day to the Brontës, Jane Austen, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman; Henry James himself produced a critical study of her work. Yet after her death Woolson was sadly forgotten. Rioux now brings her vividly back to life in a book that is both perceptive and poignant.
      • premium: False
      • source: Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
      • content: In this eloquent and deeply researched biography, Anne Boyd Rioux draws the portrait of a nineteenth-century 'lady novelist' who challenged the era's trivialization of women writers and bias against female literary ambition. Bursting out of the Jamesian frame, Constance Fenimore Woolson comes alive as an artist and a woman.
      • premium: False
      • source: Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
      • content: Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!
      • premium: False
      • source: Roxana Robinson, author of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life
      • content: I'm so glad Anne Rioux has brought Constance Fenimore Woolson to our attention. This is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings to light a wonderful nineteenth-century writer—sophisticated, eloquent, and powerful—who should be much more widely known. I hope this book will make that happen.
      • premium: False
      • source: Pierre Walker, coeditor of The Complete Letters of Henry James
      • content: A fine work of scholarship and biographical narrative. Rioux has researched her topic exhaustively and written a compelling narrative. Her work should do much to bring attention again to Woolson's undeservedly neglected life, career, and writings and to establish an accurate assessment of Woolson's relationship with Henry James.
      • premium: False
      • source: Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
      • content: Anne Boyd Rioux tells her compelling story of Constance Fenimore Woolson with force and power, the very qualities once ascribed to Woolson's own fiction. This is a beautifully researched biography of a talented American writer with a lively intellect and ambitious heart, a woman nonetheless inexorably caught in the crosshairs of nineteenth-century womanhood. The denouement, though not entirely a surprise, is devastating.
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        November 9, 2015
        In this thoughtful retelling of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s life, Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and president of the Woolson Society, seeks to bring the “lady novelist” out of the shadow of her great friend Henry James. Woolson had already published a short story collection, when, in 1880, she met James, who later used her as a model for characters in his fiction. Born in 1840 to a distinguished family—her mother’s family founded Cooperstown, N.Y., and her granduncle was the novelist James Fenimore Cooper—Woolson was a bookish, serious, observant child. Haunted by financial insecurity and depression as an adult, she led a peripatetic life in the U.S. and Europe, eventually settling down in Venice. All the while, Woolson sought to find a balance between society’s expectations for women and her own creative fire and drive, a dichotomy she never reconciled completely. Her lonely, ambiguous death at the age of 53—falling from the window of her Venetian palazzo, in an apparent suicide—is perhaps the most vivid reminder of the painful choices she had to make. Her work merits reexamination, and Rioux has brought to life an unjustly forgotten writer.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        November 15, 2015
        A fine reappraisal of the work of the Victorian novelist and dear friend to Henry James. In this comprehensive, fleshed-out biography, author Rioux (English/Univ. of New Orleans; Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America, 2004, etc.) works back from Woolson's suicide in 1894 to consider the enormous obstacles a woman writer in her era had to overcome in the sexist American literary culture. Woolson's work was largely overshadowed by her contemporary and frequent companion James, and Rioux does not speculate idly about their relationship outside of their mutual devotion to their work, loneliness, and James' essential "underlying disdain for women writers." Indeed, Woolson grasped that disdain and even--painful as it is to modern readers--subsumed the sexist strictures of the time, declaring to James, "a woman, after all, can never be a complete artist." Yet the two novelists were serializing their work in periodicals at the same time and similarly employed intelligent, thwarted, unrealized female characters in their fiction. A product of a large Cleveland family of mostly daughters--many of whom died tragically in their youth--Woolson saw firsthand the wasted fates of mothers and wives. She narrowly "escaped" (her word) a similar fate in marriage in her late 20s before choosing the writing life over teaching (the two professions available to single women), partly due to her middle name--James Fenimore Cooper was her great uncle. Woolson was determined to make a living by her pen, and she was able to support her mother and sister, moving constantly and eventually settling in Venice--although she was plagued by depression and ill health for much of her life. Rioux delineates the toll her writing ambition took on her and how, curiously, she hid her lethal literary drive from her friend James. An intelligent, sympathetic portrait of a complicated, even tortured writer who calls for fresh readers.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from January 1, 2016
        Resurrecting an American WriterConstance Fenimore Woolson (184094) was once so famous that debates about her intrepid fiction raged in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. But soon after her death, if she was remembered at all, it was only as a close friend of Henry James. Rioux has brought Woolson back to the republic of letters by writing a vivid, deeply involving biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, and by putting together Miss Grief and Other Stories, a potent collection of Woolson's short fiction. So curious as a child that she was nicknamed And Why?, the keenly intelligent Woolson became an excruciatingly self-critical young woman who read ardently and wrote beautifully. After all, she had literature in her blood; James Fenimore Cooper of The Last of the Mohicans fame was her great-uncle. Her father encouraged her but certainly didn't want her to write professionally. Fate asserted itself, however, when, all gussied up to make the social rounds and meet eligible young men, Woolson spilled a bottle of ink on her fancy dress. Yet misogynist social constraints kept her from publishing until she was 30 and in dire need of income. Rioux writes with captivating lucidity and conviction as she chronicles Woolson's fortitude, abiding responsibility, constant travels, utter commitment to artistic excellence, and exhausting struggles for literary success and personal independence. Woolson wrote not about family, as many of her female peers did, but rather about places and situations far and wild. Having grown up in Cleveland, she was deeply affected by the booming industrial town's deleterious impact on the Great Lakes region, which she depicted with a naturalist's acuity and an environmentalist's concern. She also daringly wrote from a male point of view, frequently exposing the limitations of her male characters' ability to understand women's minds and motives. Sojourns in the South during Reconstruction evoked Woolson's deep insights into the psychological toll of the Civil War, resulting in uniquely sympathetic stories about the decimated land and its traumatized people that brought her tremendous renown. As for Woolson's close relationship with Henry James during her long expat years in Europe, Rioux sensitively postulates that the two trusted and loved each other as close friends, even though rivalry seethed. Contending with deafness and depression, Woolson sought human connection in literature, perfecting an approach that Rioux describes as empathic realism. Woolson not only held herself to high ethical standards, she was also a perfectionist, exhausting herself physically as she rewrote her manuscripts over and over again. All that effort, and still she remained poor and without a home, dying tragically and possibly suicidally in Venice at age 53. In conclusion, Rioux offers smart and poignant insights into why Woolson was forgotten and why her unapologetically sincere and passionate novels and stories fell so swiftly out of favor. It is a boon for everyone interested in American literature and women's lives to have Woolson back on the shelf.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from December 1, 2015

        Constance Fenimore Woolson, a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, was a prolific and acclaimed 19th-century writer in her own right, penning novels and short stories set in such places as Michigan's Mackinac Island and the postbellum South. Woolson also had a close literary friendship with Henry James. Unfortunately, her significant literary contributions were forgotten within a few decades of her death in 1894. Rioux (English, Univ. of New Orleans; Wielding the Pen) attempts to remedy this oversight with this excellent biography. This work is thoroughly researched, with the author drawing from correspondence, journals, and other archival documents, as well as featuring photos and passages from Woolson's noteworthy literary works. Despite Woolson's success and welcome relocation to Europe, she struggled with deafness and severe depression. The author also had to confront the extreme male chauvinism held toward women writers in late 19th-century literary circles. Her death in Venice after a fall from a window was most likely a suicide. VERDICT An important contribution to reestablishing this long overlooked writer to her rightful place in the American literary canon, this excellent book will captivate readers interested in women's studies and late 19th-century American literature. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 15, 2015

        Regarded as a model for Isabelle Archer in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, novelist/poet/travelogist Constance Fenimore Woolson was an acclaimed and popular writer during her lifetime but faded into the background after her death in 1894. Now there's a resurgence of interest in Woolson, with her works seen as strong early examples of both regional literature and the women's perspective.

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        December 1, 2015

        Constance Fenimore Woolson, a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, was a prolific and acclaimed 19th-century writer in her own right, penning novels and short stories set in such places as Michigan's Mackinac Island and the postbellum South. Woolson also had a close literary friendship with Henry James. Unfortunately, her significant literary contributions were forgotten within a few decades of her death in 1894. Rioux (English, Univ. of New Orleans; Wielding the Pen) attempts to remedy this oversight with this excellent biography. This work is thoroughly researched, with the author drawing from correspondence, journals, and other archival documents, as well as featuring photos and passages from Woolson's noteworthy literary works. Despite Woolson's success and welcome relocation to Europe, she struggled with deafness and severe depression. The author also had to confront the extreme male chauvinism held toward women writers in late 19th-century literary circles. Her death in Venice after a fall from a window was most likely a suicide. VERDICT An important contribution to reestablishing this long overlooked writer to her rightful place in the American literary canon, this excellent book will captivate readers interested in women's studies and late 19th-century American literature. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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"Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!" —Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature.

Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson's dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family's ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a...

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