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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!

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

Took this volume of back out on a whim. I had really enjoyed the selections from *Castle Nowhere*, which was mostly set around the Great Lakes, but had trouble getting into the next set of stories set in the South (from *Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches*).

Anyhow, decided to give it another go. The first two stories, the title story and "Sister St. Luke," fell rather flat to me, although the second was by far the better of the two.

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

"Rodman the Keeper" is very much a late-Reconstruction era, North-South reconciliation story.

A man from the North who had fought in the war has taken a job as a national cemetery keeper in the South. He is a loner but winds up tending to an ex-Confederate soldier that is ill and has little family. They never reconcile, per se, but their tentative relationship is (I presume) Woolson's way of suggesting that reconciliation between sections, though hard, may be possible.

The ex-Confederate is primarily cared for by a black servant named Pomp, who had been enslaved by the family prior to the war... The servants/freedpersons in the story are mostly to the side and flat in dimension, and yet Woolson makes at least one interesting move in her presentation of them: she waffles in how to refer to Pomp's status. He is referred to as a slave, as a servant, and (if I remember right) decisively as free, at one point.

And black southerners play one more curious role here: in one scene, on Memorial Day, a black procession at the cemetery is the only significant show of respect.

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

What is so hard, with literature from this period, is to parse what is intentional and what is incidental, in how these authors deal with matters of race, slavery, the war itself, and extending to matters of nationalism and history, etc.

One could mount a generous reading of the story by recognizing it is largely told from the perspective of the Northerner, and thus shows the limited vision of both parties, including the supposedly more noble of the two.

Or, one could argue that this is just Woolson's own well-intentioned but limited understanding of race and the war showing, one she very much shares with many others of her time. The North's literary fascination with the South after the war is deep and a lot of it feels like this (in my limited reading of it).

I tend toward the latter, I think... but it's easy to …