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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.

"Sister St Luke" was much more interesting. Two men - travelers? adventurers? where do they get their money? - stop at an island and befriend the lighthouse keeper, his wife, and a nun from a nearby convent that is staying with them for a while.

The premise is really weird, and the conditions that led to this encounter are unclear, but the men spend time exploring the small island and, at the same time, getting to know the nun, who is young and quite timid.

(The story has some strong resemblance to aspects of her "St Clair Flats")

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

The relationship between the parties is what is most interesting, and there are differences of culture and religion that are centered here. Woolson sets a lot of the story around a sort of exaggerated Catholic mystery: the nun, whose world is the convent and the men take for being rather dull and of limited mind, ultimately saves the men in a storm.

(This act leads the lighthouse keeper's very Protestant wife to begin attending a local mission weekly.)

Anyhow, this has nowhere near the mystery and beauty of St Clair Flats or some of the stories from that earlier volume, but it does show off Woolson's interest in defined subcultures, or in moments of cultural/religious difference.

That's what stood out to me from my reading of her earlier, and I hope one or stories from this collection do that interest a bit more justice.

replied to Trevor Burrows's status

Two more quick notes:
1) Woolson's women characters are often markedly independent but in subtle ways. In Sister St Luke, the lighthouse keeper's wife, Melvyna, effectively keeps her maiden name w/o formally keeping it, and has a strong identity apart from her husband that ties her back to her (New England?) roots.

2) There is a recognition of the southern east coast's long history in Sister St Luke, with references to territory being passed from the Spanish to the English and finally the U.S. Yet there is a brief allusion to indigenous history, in describing a trail "made by the fierce Creeks three centuries before." I've become lowkey fascinated by this period's fictional treatments of indigenous history, where they are aware of it, acknowledge it, but often write around it. Logging this here to come back to later, maybe.