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		Rioux, Anne Boyd.

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		Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 1840-1894.
		James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Friends and associates.
		James, Henry, 1843-1916. Portrait of a lady -- Sources.
		Women novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography.
		Women journalists -- United States -- Biography
		Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
		Depressed persons -- Biography.

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		Rioux, Anne Boyd.
		Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 1840-1894.
		James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Friends and associates.
		James, Henry, 1843-1916. Portrait of a lady -- Sources.
		Women novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography.
		Women journalists -- United States -- Biography
		Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
		Depressed persons -- Biography.


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Constance Fenimore Woolson : portrait of a lady novelist / Anne Boyd Rioux.

by Rioux, Anne Boyd.

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W.W. Norton & Company, [2016]

Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 1840-1894.

James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Friends and associates.

James, Henry, 1843-1916. Portrait of a lady -- Sources.

Women novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography.

Women journalists -- United States -- Biography

Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

Depressed persons -- Biography.

9780393245097 (hc.)

xix, 391 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-369) and index.

Prologue : Portraits -- Part one : An education in womanhood (1840-1869). A daughter's country ; Lessons in literature, life, and death ; Turning points -- Part two : An education in authorship (1870-1879). False starts ; Departures ; Dark places -- Part three : A European experiment (1879-1886). The old world at last ; The artists's life ; The expatriate's life -- Part four : The Bellosguardo years (1886-1889). Home found ; Confrère ; Arcadia lost -- Part five : The final years (1890-1894). To Cairo and back ; Oxford ; The riddle of existence ; Aftershocks -- Epilogue : Remembrance.

"Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894), who contributed to Henry James's conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson's dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family's ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father's death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward. Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil-War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. Woolson published her first novel Anne in 1880, followed by three others: East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889) and Horace Chase (1894). In 1883 she published the novella For the Major, a story of the postwar South that has become one of her most respected fictions. In 1889 she traveled to Egypt and Greece, which resulted in a collection of travel sketches. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton's work of the next generation. Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson's character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today."--Provided by publisher.

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