Collected Stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson

Collected Stories
By Constance Fenimore Woolson
Library of America, 2020

Sometimes the Library of America commemorates the universally renowned by bringing out volumes of Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin; sometimes the Library of America echoes acclaim by bringing out volumes of more recent luminaries like Ursula Le Guin or Paul Bowles; and sometimes the Library of America performs a blessedly archival role by enshrining figures who’ve been largely forgotten by the general reading public. The first category is the safest bet. The second category is the surest way to get the book-chat world talking. But it’s often the third category that’s the most interesting. We might appreciate a lovely, understated new volume of Melville for our shelves, but we relish exploring the work of a William Wells Brown, or a William Bartram.

It’s a bit melancholy to concede that one of the latest Library of America volumes, a collection of stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson, falls into this third category. Woolson was born in 1840, and it wasn’t long after her fiction first started getting published in 1870 that discerning critics were comparing her to the best literary lights then shining. The volume, edited by Anne Boyd Rioux (whose excellent book Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy deals with Woolson’s contemporary, Louisa May Alcott), features a brief Chronology of Woolson’s life that underscores both her productivity and her popularity, and although a note attests to a minor resurgence in the teaching of Woolson’s work in schools, the much larger reading public she once reached has long since forgotten her.

This present volume contains twenty-three stories selected from the story collections Castle Nowhere and Rodman the Keeper, and they all strive for a deeply impressionistic sense of place, whether that place was the Great Lakes region, the postwar American South, or the Italy with which Woolson fell in love later in her life. And although Woolson’s language often reflects the racial crudities of her day - a young black boy in the title story of Rodman the Keeper, for instance, is referred to by the third person narrator as both a “darkey” and a “salamander” in the course of only two paragraphs - her portraits into human nature are typically every bit as sharp and unflinching as those of her friend and admirer Henry James. Rodman is the superintendent of a Northern military cemetery on Southern soil, and his fidelity to his job is ironclad even though he himself is never portrayed as even remotely likable: 

At sunrise the keeper ran up the stars and stripes; and so precise were his ideas of the accessories belonging to the place, that from his own small store of money he had taken enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the dead. This was not patriotism so called, or rather miscalled, it was not not sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph; it was simply a sense of the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which had in it nothing of religion, unless indeed a man’s endeavor to live up to his own ideal of his duty be a religion.

The reader encountering Woolson in these pages finds that her eye misses nothing, and her writer’s urge to animate the world extends everywhere. In “Wilhelmina,” for instance, as so often elsewhere she breathes a poetic simplicity into the farm scenes she depicts:

Away she ran as the first solemn cow came into view, heading the long procession meandering slowly toward the stalls. They knew nothing of haste, these dignified Community cows; from stall to pasture, from pasture to stall, in a plethora of comfort, this was their life. The silver-haired shepherd came last with his staff and scrip, and the nervous shepherd-dog ran hither and thither in the hope of finding some cow to bark at; but the comfortable cows moved on in orderly ranks, and he was obliged to dart off on a tanged every now and then, and bark at nothing, to relieve his feelings.

She’s equally adept at the quicker cuts of seemingly incidental insights that lodge in the mind, as when a character in “A Florentine Experiment” reflects on how “grandly solitary” Florence’s Duomo can be on a rainy day: “It makes one feel as if already disembodied - as if he were a shade, wandering on the gray, unknown outskirts of another world.” Or the moment in “A Transplanted Boy” when a character is described as having “a face that resembled a damaged portrait of Emerson.” 

“A Transplanted Boy” reached Woolson’s readers after she herself had left them; it was published posthumously in February 1894, a month after its author fell from the balcony of her rooms in Venice and died. Again, the volume’s Chronology hints because it lacks the remit to explore - was it suicide, as officially declared, or merely an accidental result of sedative-induced delirium? 

For that further exploration, readers are encouraged to seek out Boyd Rioux’s 2016 biography of Woolson. But in the sense that’s true of all passionate, unsparing authors, maybe the truest biography is right here, in the work.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.