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!

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

#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

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.