She was often compared to Henry James and George Eliot and considered one of the foremost American writers of the nineteenth century. Woolson is, in my book, the most interesting and accomplished among them.ĭigging through old reviews and letters, I was thrilled to learn that Woolson was hailed by critics, even called America’s “novelist laureate” by the Boston Globe, and given an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, who published all of her novels (under her own name) in the prestigious Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

It is important to me that women writers and readers today know that there were other kinds of women writers in the nineteenth century who had successful careers and fulfilling lives. When we think of women writing in the nineteenth century, images come to mind of Emily Dickinson, who hid herself and her poetry from the world the Brontë sisters who were deprived of experience and died young or George Eliot, who had to masquerade as a man to win respect. My real hope is not only that she will be read by general audiences once again but also that women writers will find in her a lost literary foremother and will be inspired by her example. I am one of them and decided it was time to bring her out of the insular academic world and into the limelight. There is also an outside chance that you read her story “Miss Grief” in a college class on women’s or American literature, since it is included in college literature anthologies.īut for the most part Woolson is known primarily by a small group of scholars trying to keep her name alive. If you have heard of her, then you have probably read Colm Toibin’s fine novel The Master, about Woolson’s friend Henry James, in which she makes a few appearances. Her name was Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894). I wrote a dissertation about them and a scholarly book called Writing for Immortality, published in 2004.īut I couldn’t stop there. There I found a number of women writers who sought serious recognition and devoted their lives to achieving it, at least for a while.

But the more I looked, the further back I went until I landed in the Civil War era and the late-nineteenth century.

I assumed I would find my first examples of women writers committed to serious art in the Modernist period. And when I decided to go to graduate school and make a stab at becoming a professor (another kind of less-travelled road for women), I knew I had to try to answer it. About the time I was trying to decide if I could be a writer I started to wonder, when did women first have the nerve to commit themselves to careers as serious authors and to say, despite few female role models to follow, I can succeed at this as well as men? I wondered because, in the 1990s, it still seemed like such a daring and difficult thing to do.

Anne by constance fenimore woolson