WOOLSON, CONSTANCE FENIMORE. 



789 



was a grandniece of the novelist. Her mother, 

 as may be supposed, was a woman of refinement 

 and strong literary tastes, and Mr. Woolson 

 himself was not her inferior in mental qualities, 

 being noted as a fine conversationist. The 

 family removed to Cleveland, Ohio, while Con- 

 stance was still a child, her father's business 

 interests being centered there. He became fa- 

 mous as a manufacturer of stoves, and is said to 

 have prospered in spite of many reverses from 

 fires and dishonest partners. Constance was 

 educated at a Cleveland young ladies' seminary, 

 and at the famous French school of Madame 

 Chegaray in New York. She received a thor- 

 ough and altogether conventional education in 

 the studies of the day. Her summers were 

 chiefly spent, while she was a girl, on the island 

 of Mackinac, in the straits connecting Lakes 

 Huron and Michigan, and in this way her fa- 

 miliarity with the wilder aspects of that region 

 was obtained. She often, also, accompanied her 



CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON. 



father on driving trips for business or pleasure 

 to the shores of Lake Superior, through the 

 farming districts of the Western Reserve, and 

 up and down the Ohio valley, until she knew 

 the whole region that includes the Great Lakes 

 and the Central States. In a letter to a friend 

 she wrote : " Although I was born in New 

 Hampshire, although my father was a New 

 Hampshire man and my mother a New York 

 woman, I am supposed to belong to ' Ohio.'. . . 

 I have walked on the shores of Lake Erie, 

 driven all through the ' coal country ' and the 

 ' corn country ' with my father ; I know all the 

 hills, and dales, and rivers ; I have sailed up 

 and down the Ohio ; have been to the harvest 



fields, and even helped ; have gathered the 

 apples, and been to State fairs." There is an 

 interesting description of Madame Chegaray 

 and life at the old French school in 



Woolson's "Anne." Returning from school, 

 she became a strong partisan of the National 

 Government in the civil war, and was more 

 powerfully affected by this episode than by 

 any other experience of her life. Some years 

 afterward this feeling found expression in a 

 long poem, " Two Women," published in " Ap- 

 pletons' Journal" in 1877, and afterward in 

 book form. It is a story of a Northern and ;i 

 Southern girl who meet on a train on their way to 

 nurse a wounded officer who has loved them both 

 and who dies. Although "Two Women " was 

 highly commended by the press, Miss Woolson 

 was not encouraged to continue work as a poet. 



She had been brought up in the Episcopal 

 faith, and had written considerably for period- 

 icals of that denomination when her father's 

 death, in 1869, broke up the family home in 

 Cleveland and urged her to serious pursuits. 

 Through her brother-in-law, George S. Benedict, 

 son of the editor of the Cleveland " Herald," she 

 was introduced to several New York publishers. 

 Her first story in a secular periodical was " The 

 Happy Valley," which appeared in " Harper's 

 Monthly" for 1870. This was followed by nu- 

 merous stories, descriptive articles, and short 

 poems in that magazine and in " Appletons' 

 Journal," and she soon became prominent as an 

 author. By advice of her publishers, Miss Wool- 

 son wrote over her full name, and her relation- 

 ship to Cooper was duly set forth ; but while this 

 was helpful at first, there was little need of it 

 afterward. Besides her purely creative work, 

 Miss Woolson wrote many descriptive articles, 

 some of them in the guise of stories, and some of 

 them plain descriptions of the places that she vis- 

 ited. Among the earliest of these were " The 

 Haunted Lake " (Otsego), devoted to Cooper and 

 his home, and " The Ancient City " (St. Augus- 

 tine), both printed in the seventies. " Corfu and 

 the Ionian Sea " appeared in " Harper's " as late 

 as 1892. Scarcely any of this work was collected 

 in book form, and the 40 or 50 short poems that 

 the author contributed to periodicals have never 

 been brought together. 



Miss Woolson's first volume of selected stories, 

 " Castle Nowhere : Lake Country Sketches," ap- 

 peared in 1875. They all relate to the region of 

 the Great Lakes, and include " The Lady of Little 

 Fishing," which has been called the most char- 

 acteristic of her short stories. Meanwhile her 

 mother's failing health necessitated a trip to 

 Florida, where she went in the autumn of 1873. 

 She made her winter home at St. Augustine and 

 on an island in St. John's river for the five suc- 

 ceeding years, spending her summers in the 

 mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, in 

 South Carolina and Georgia, and later with her 

 relatives at Cooperstown, N. Y. She cared little 

 for the fashionable life of St. Augustine in spite 

 of her familiarity with society and its ways, but 

 devoted herself to boating and other outdoor 

 amusements. Even at this time her hearing 

 had become more than ordinarily defective, and 

 in the case of a woman this invariably brings 

 something of isolation. This long sojourn in 

 the South was productive of immediate literary 



