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Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories

“Miss Grief” | Rodman the Keeper | The Front Yard | Dorothy | 23 stories in all More

Edited by Anne Boyd Rioux

A landmark of literary recovery: the first major edition of one of the most esteemed and popular writers of nineteenth-century America

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “St. Clair Flats”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “In Sloane Street”
March 4, 2022

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Lady of Little Fishing”
August 13, 2021

When Constance Fenimore Woolson died in Venice in 1894 at the age of fifty-three, having jumped or fallen out of a third-story window, she was memorialized in all the major American papers, compared with George Eliot, Jane Austen, and the Brontës as one of the greatest women writers in English. In her lifetime, her novels and story collections enjoyed not only critical esteem but also commercial success of a kind her male rivals (and friends) Henry James and William Dean Howells seldom attained. For all that, Woolson was largely forgotten in the twentieth century, noted if at all because of her connection to James. Now, thanks to the recovery work of scholars and biographers in recent decades, we are regaining a proper sense of Woolson’s place in American literature, and of the brilliance and originality of her work.

With this volume Library of America presents the biggest and best edition of Woolson’s short fiction ever published. Here are twenty-one stories chosen from her four collections—Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875), Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895), and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896)—as well as two uncollected stories. Together they reveal Woolson as an innovator of American literary realism, a writer of deep feeling, complexity, and extraordinary descriptive powers.

Her arresting early work, set in the Great Lakes region, transformed the local color story from sentimental armchair travel into sophisticated, tough-minded fiction, as in the hauntingly vivid “St. Clair Flats” and “Solomon,” about women living with mad or visionary husbands in extremely isolated places. Other stories set in the Reconstruction South, written while the nation was still grieving the effects of the Civil War, explore poisonous racial and sectional tensions. In “Rodman the Keeper,” one of her finest Southern stories, a keeper of the dead in a nameless Union cemetery reluctantly becomes a caregiver to the living—a wounded Confederate veteran. In the final phase of her career, after she left the United States, Woolson turned her attention to international themes and the plight of women writers. Few have written as incisively about the way in which women were treated by their male contemporaries as Woolson does in “The Street of the Hyacinth” and “‘Miss Grief.’”

Anne Boyd Rioux, editor, is the author of several books, including Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. A professor of English at the University of New Orleans, she is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, one for public scholarship.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “St. Clair Flats”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “In Sloane Street”
March 4, 2022

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “The Lady of Little Fishing”
August 13, 2021

Story of the Week Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Solomon”
February 28, 2020

Interviews (Re)introducing the “decidedly unsentimental and modern” Constance Fenimore Woolson
February 26, 2020
Table of Contents

from Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches
Peter the Parson
Jeannette
Solomon
Wilhelmina
St. Clair Flats
The Lady of Little Fishing

from Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches
Rodman the Keeper
Sister St. Luke
Miss Elisabetha
Old Gardiston
The South Devil
In the Cotton Country
Felipa
King David

from The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories
The Front Yard
A Pink Villa
The Street of the Hyacinth

from Dorothy and Other Italian Stories
Dorothy
A Transplanted Boy
A Florentine Experiment
At the Château of Corinne

Uncollected Stories
“Miss Grief”
In Sloane Street

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-650-8 733 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 327 Library of America Series

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