Pinning this for notes as I read through this #LibraryOfAmerica collection of Constance Fenimore Woolson's stories.

Have read four stories so far, all from her first volume of stories, *Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches*

"Peter the Parson" - a priest in a rough-and-tumble mining town has few congregants and gets little respect. His fate gets tangled up with a deceitful pastor and he falls victim to vigilante justice.

"Jeannette" - a woman of mixed background (indigenous, French, English) is the recipient of a white do-gooder's attention, who seeks to educate her, as well as the attention of an older white gentleman who wants to marry her. Neither of them actually know Jeannette very well at all.

"Solomon" - two vacationing, interloping upper-class women fall for the love story of an artist who gives up his craft so he can support his wife as a miner. This is the first of the stories presented here to happen near Zoar, Ohio, with reference to the separatist community that settled there.

"Wilhelmina" - this one takes place within the Zoarite community. When young men from the community go off to fight in the civil war - against the rules of the community - one leaves behind a young woman (Wilhelmina) who refuses to move on. This one is also told from the perspective of an interloping do-gooder who gets wrapped up in the titular character's romance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoar,_Ohio

So Woolson wrote several volumes of short stories (two published during her lifetime, two posthumously), a number of novels, and quite a bit of poetry.

Much of her stories and a few of her novels are available in e-copies via @gutenberg_org and other sources.

Yet very little of her #Poetry has been published online! It's a really good example of how even prominent writers (of their time), whose stuff is fully in #PublicDomain, has not yet it made its way to the internet.

(I find it good to have these examples to share with students, when encouraging them to visit a physical library and not just rely on what they can find in electronic databases!)

#ConstanceFenimoreWoolson #NineteenthCenturyLiterature

#MorningReading was Fenimore Woolson's "St. Clair Flats" and *whoa* -- this is the first of the bunch to really stand out!

When, a few pages in, two travelers (including the narrator), somewhat lost upon extensive marshland, are directed to the house of someone named Waiting Samuel for shelter. We are treated to this humorous scene:

"'What is he waiting for?' I called back over my shoulder; for Raymond was rowing.

'The judgment-day!' answered Liakim, in a shrill key. The boats were now far apart; another turn, and we were alone."

(By that point I knew I was in for a treat! Some notes later.)

#ConstanceFenimoreWoolson #GreatLakesLiterature #NineteenthCenturyLiterature

Descriptions of small boats weaving through the grasses and narrow channels of Great Lakes marshland brought to mind a tune I heard just a day or two before: "Weaving" from Scheen Jazzorkester and Thomas Johansson, from their recent "Frameworks" release. On an otherwise free, occasionally skronky record, "Weaving" floats with a bit of gentleness and aimlessness. Quite pretty, maybe wistful.

Listen here:
https://cleanfeedrecords.bandcamp.com/track/weaving

#ScheenJazzorkester

A few quick notes on "St Clair Flats":

1) There's something satirical or parodying about the story, riffing on the gothic interests of the 19th c. The traveling strangers swap bits of poetry a few times, usually in a sort of coded commentary on things they are witnessing. "Annabel Lee" is one; a bit of "Haunted House" by Thomas Hood is another. And certainly there are portions of the story that are, if not suspenseful, strange and a bit creepy.

The travelers are witty and humorous; they take what they witness with a fair bit of distance and irony. Yet they aren't wholly above being unnerved by certain aspects of their journey, and neither is the reader.

2) That use of poetry to distance her travelers from the world they are observing and moving through is itself really interesting. At first, I was bored by this repetition of CFW's narrators being strangers, interlopers/tourists/quasi-anthropologists. But it's clearly done consciously, and the differences of class (among other distinctions) between her narrators and their subjects are part of the story.

"St. Clair Flats" reads, to me, as something more than nostalgia, or more than mourning for a fleeting past as represented by a exclusionary religious order or isolated cult-ish visionaries. But I think I need to sit with it longer, maybe even give it another read, to parse that out.

3) I am working on a project right now that centers on constructions of religion in the rural Midwest, late 19th/early 20th century --- so what a joy to find an attentiveness to religious diversity in these stories I've read so far, all in the Great Lakes region!

In "Peter the Parson," there are Protestant/Catholic issues simmering behind the social drama.

In "Wilhelmina" and "Solomon," the Zoarite community looms large.

And here in St. Clair Flats, we get a would-be millenarian prophet, complete with his own interpretation of scripture and a hint of astrology.