Review: 'Constance Fenimore Woolson,' by Anne Boyd Rioux

Writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-94), the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, is better known these days for her friendship with Henry James than she is for her own work. Anne Boyd Rioux's new biography might change that.

James took an interest in her work and wrote an influential article about her. The two shared lodgings at one point, although none of his biographers believe the two writers were lovers. Still, James' lofty reputation is such that his biographers, especially Leon Edel, presume Woolson mooned over James.

Where is the evidence? It does not exist, Rioux reports in "Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist." Rioux then goes on to demolish a good deal of the male romanticism that attributes Woolson's death — after a fall from a window in Venice — to James' inattention.

Rioux's Woolson chose to live independently of men. Although Woolson once came close to marrying, ultimately she did not regret her decision to live alone. If she committed suicide, perhaps in a drugged delirium, she did so not because of disappointment in love, but from exhaustion, increasing deafness, worries about money and concerns about whether she could continue following her high-minded desire to write great literature.

In her ambition and in the range of her work, Woolson was a precursor to writers such as Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, Woolson aimed to attract a popular audience and an elite one. Her novels and stories are noteworthy for psychological realism, depictions of many different male characters and portraits of numerous female figures who aspire to create great art.

So why isn't Woolson better known in her own right? She died before the first wave of modernism hit. If she had lived longer, she might well have made the sort of transition that benefited her contemporaries such as Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton — although even in these cases, decades needed to pass before these writers were canonized. Also, as Rioux points out, the mystique of the artist as suicide had yet to be inscribed in the public's consciousness. Woolson was consigned to the relics of the genteel age, a sincere but unsophisticated writer lacking irony.

Such dismissals, in Rioux's view, underestimate Woolson, who wrote the best fictional accounts of the Reconstruction period in the South, as well as stories about the Great Lakes that remain classics — and other accomplished fiction that was devalued in Woolson's own time because, it was said, her characters would not serve as role models for women.

Rioux is an excellent scholar who has assessed her sources shrewdly. She gets in trouble, though, when she tries to fill gaps with that bane of all biographers, "must have been," which can be translated as, "I don't know, but let's pretend that I do." Even so, Rioux's biography is the place to start before you make your way to Woolson's work, now available in e-book editions.

Carl Rollyson is the author of "American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath," and "Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography."

<p class="Text_Info_HedLarge">CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON</p><p class="Text_Info__NoIndent">By: Anne Boyd Rioux.</p><p class="Text_Info__NoIndent">Publisher: W.W. Norton, 391 pages, $32.95.</p>