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started reading Constance Fenimore Woolson by Anne Boyd Rioux

Anne Boyd Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Constance Fenimore Woolson (2020, Library of America, The) No rating

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer …

The metadata for this is a bit odd, but this is the #LibraryOfAmerica volume of Woolson. It is not a complete collection (which is interesting) but rather collected stories, with a few missing from each of the volumes published during her lifetime and immediately after her death.

Have not read any Woolson previously, and excited by her apparent interest (implicit or explicit) in regionality. Not a whole lot of fiction writers from this period were dwelling on the upper #Midwest!

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.

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

"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