11. Constance Fenimore Woolson — Anne with Anne Boyd Rioux

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: What if I were to tell you that there’s a 19th-century American novel that combines the sweetness of Little Women, the adventure of Great Expectations, the heroine of Jane Eyre, the social drama of Age of Innocence and the mystery of a Sherlock Holmes tale?

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: I’d say, “Whoa, that sounds incredible.” I’d also say it also sounds like the plot of a little-known novel called Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: Get ready, everybody, for some serious fan-girl gushing on this episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, because this book totally blew our minds. 

KIM: Yeah, Amy, had you even heard of Woolson before we started researching authors for the podcast?

AMY: Not at all, no, but I did think that her name sounded pretty familiar: “Fenimore,” as in James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. But I know you had heard of this author, right?

KIM: I had heard of her, but only as a little footnote to the bio of her friend, Henry James. I wrote my master’s thesis on his novel Wings of a Dove.

AMY: So, while we didn’t know much, if anything, about Woolson before we started the podcast, it’s for that reason, especially, that we’re excited to talk about it here today, because we have our very first Lost Ladies of Lit guest! 

KIM: Our guest is Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux, and she knows a LOT about Constance Fenimore Woolson. In fact, it was a review of a new edition of Woolson’s Collected Stories — that was edited by Anne, our guest — in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, that inspired me to add Woolson to our list of Lost Ladies. Anne is an expert on American women writers. She uncovers the stories of their lives and fosters renewed appreciation for their forgotten or undervalued works.

AMY: She is also the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities awards and has a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and is on the board of directors of the Biographers International Organization. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Lit Hub, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s also been interviewed on the BBC and NPR. 

KIM: And on top of all that, her most recent book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, is an indie bestseller and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. Also it’s out in paperback right now. 

AMY: So one of the reasons we wanted Anne to come chat with us today is because she actually wrote the biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Her 2016 book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist received considerable attention. It was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The Chicago Tribune. Also, she edited a collection of Woolson’s short stories, called Miss Grief and Other Stories, and that’s also helping bring Woolson the renewed attention that she deserves.  

KIM: Okay, with all that said, it’s pretty clear Anne’s going to be able to bring a lot to our discussion of the OTHER Anne, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music] 

INTERVIEW:

AMY: Welcome, Anne, thanks so much for joining us today! 

ANNE BOYD RIOUX [GUEST]: Well, I’m excited to be here! Thank you for inviting me.

AMY: Now, it was just a few months ago that I was introduced to this book, and I’ve got to say, within… I hadn’t even reached the end of the first chapter before I was just beside myself with joy. I cannot believe I didn’t know about this author, this is so wonderful already… and the book just kept getting better and better. How did you first become interested in Woolson and when did you first read Anne?

ANNE: I was in graduate school at Purdue, and I was in the library stacks and I just saw this book with my name on it, you know, in bright gold letters: Anne. It was calling to me, and so I stopped and looked. It was an older edition, original-ish edition. They had her other works there, and nearby was a more recent collection of stories called Women Artists, Women Exiles. And I thought, “Well, that sounds right up my alley!” So I actually started with that collection of stories that was published in the Rutgers [University Press] “American Women Writers” series that was recovering a lot of lost women writers. That was published in the Eighties, just to give you a sense of how long ago she was “recovered” by scholars. It’s taken a really long time to get her into the more public consciousness. I’m just thrilled that you all found her, too. Let’s see, when did I first read Anne? I read it when I was still in graduate school, so I probably read it around the time that I went to Mackinac. The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society was having its second (I think it was their second) conference, and they were having it at Mackinac Island. I was just so keen to go and to meet all of these… I met, to me they were famous, right — Sharon Dean, Cheryl Torsney — all these people who had written about Woolson. Caroline Gebhardt was there. Nina Baym was also there. She’s a big-time scholar in American literature. She was the keynote speaker. So it was just a thrill to meet all of them. Lyndall Gordon was there. She wrote a really important book about Henry James. Anyway, going to Mackinac Island was such a treat, and getting to meet all those people when I was still a graduate student.

AMY: By the way, listeners, we’re going to be getting into Mackinac Island a lot more in our next episode because I want to dive into all of that: the little kind of shrine that exists there for Constance these days. But let’s go back and talk a little bit about Constance’s life. I know she had an interesting, kind of tragic childhood. She had three of her older sisters die of scarlet fever when she was very young,and then, when she was five years old, she had a younger sister that died in infancy. Can you tell us a little more about her youth and maybe how it impacted her adult life and her writings? 

ANNE: We don’t know tons, right? What we do know, though, is pretty tragic. So these three sisters died of scarlet fever. They started dropping off days or weeks, right after she was born. Because she was a newborn and was nursing, apparently she was protected by her mother’s antibodies. There were five girls that came before Connie, and the three youngest of those five girls died, and that was just … her mother was never the same after that. In that respect, it had a huge impact on her life, because her mother suffered periods of invalidism and she always had to look out for her. So she kind of grew up looking out for her mother. The two older girls, Georgiana and Emma, died quite young in their late teens/early 20s. And so by the time Connie was 13, even though she was the sixth child born, she was the oldest of her surviving siblings. By that point, she had a younger sister and a younger brother. So it was quite a lot of responsibility thrust on her, and it was a lot of death to witness. She learned very early that life was fragile, and particularly the deaths of those two oldest sisters had a great impact on her because she was alive and she knew exactly how it happened. In both cases, they were viewed as sacrificing their own lives for love and family: One of them had died after marrying a man who had had consumption. He died and then she died, so it was a really tragic, Shakespearean kind of story, right? And her oldest sister also died of tuberculosis (it appears) after giving birth, even though she was told she shouldn’t have another child. So you know, the idea of marriage was treacherous. The idea of having a family was treacherous. Boy, you were just setting yourself up for so much potential loss and sacrifice and potential death. Those deaths in her family had a huge impact on her, and I think we see that reflected in her work.

AMY: Did she go by “Connie?” I hadn’t ever heard that nickname associated with her.

ANNE: Hmm, yeah, sorry, “My good friend, Connie…” Yes.

KIM: I love it.

ANNE: That was the name that her family gave her. So especially when talking about her when she was little, I guess I just kind of slip into that. That was her family name. 

KIM: That’s interesting, everything you said about her sort of living with this childhood tragedy in her life, because it kind of plays into the little bit that I did know about Woolson before we started this podcast. And I think a lot of people may have heard this story and not also know much more about Woolson. But what I did know was that supposedly, her life ended when she threw herself from the third story of a palazzo in Venice because Henry James didn’t return her affection. And that sounds kind of tabloidish, but I think the real story that I learned about is just as interesting, if not more so. So I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. How did they meet? What is the real story?

ANNE: Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that is what most people seem to know about her. I decided when I wrote my biography of her to just start with that, not ignore it. And also to make this point that the real story actually is much more interesting and satisfying, I think. The problem with that story — there are a few problems with it — but it’s based on anecdotes that are not verifiable. There are no real facts there, except that we know she died and she was living in Venice in a room that was three stories up. There’s also a story about him drowning her dresses in the lagoon months later. These dresses kept ballooning up because of the air inside of them, so they just wouldn’t drown. So it’s this very interesting metaphor for how she kind of haunted him after she died. Unfortunately, she’s become a kind of ghost figure in his life and didn’t have a real presence of her own. And so, it was really important for me to tell her story and get some of her writings republished. But the real story about her friendship with James is that there’s no smoking gun here. There’s no evidence that she was in love with him romantically and there is negative evidence that she killed herself because of him. There’s plenty of other evidence to suggest that it was more complicated than that. We don’t know for sure and may never know exactly what was going through her mind before she fell and if it was intentional. My own opinion is that it probably was, but it was maybe less premeditated than some people maybe assumed. But i don’t think those final minutes of her life should define the rest of her life as tragic and as somehow thwarted and misspent. I think she had an incredible life for her time, and she was such an amazing person. The difficulty though, in uncovering what the “real” story is about her and Henry James is that they had a pact to destroy their letters to each other. Only four of her letters to him have survived. They were letters that she wrote to him when he was at home in America visiting his family. And so the letters came to him in America and he didn’t bring them back to Europe with him. They stayed behind. So it was later, then, that they developed this agreement to destroy their letters. The four letters ended up in his brother’s papers, William James’s papers, at Harvard. Henry James’s biographer, Leon Edel, found them. At that point, I think that was in the Fifties, Claire, her niece, was still alive.  And Leon Edel wrote to her and told her there were four letters that he found. Her response was, “That’s a shame.” Because these were four letters that were written early on in their friendship. There were no letters from him to her; it was one-sided. So the impression these four letters have left is that she was the one chasing after him. But it’s such a tiny picture of the story. They were friends for 12 years. They met in 1880 in Florence. She had a letter of introduction that she had brought with her from America from his cousin, whom she’d met in Cooperstown. She met “the great man.” He wasn’t even “the great man” yet even. He was kind of the darling of the Atlantic Monthly, and Woolson recognized that he was much favored, particularly by William Dean Howells, and had the kind of recognition already that she would like to have, too, but she was just as well-known at the time. She was writing in Harper’s and Scribner’s and The Atlantic Monthly. She hadn’t published any novels yet, but when she met him, she kind of hoped and expected that they would meet as writers. Unfortunately, he didn’t know who she was. He claimed he didn’t know her and hadn’t read her work. So instead they met as he’s a gallant man and she’s a damsel who needed his chivalry kind of thing, you know. Very 19th century. It was unfortunate for her that they met that way, because she wanted to get beyond that. It took her a few years to build up that kind of relationship with him. But it was clear, even though they destroyed these letters that they had a kind of… I call it a quasi-sibling relationship because I think they did love each other, but not in a mad, romantic, “let’s have sex” kind of way. Whether or not she had those kind of feelings for him, I didn’t find a single scrap of evidence to support that reading, or I would have put that in the book because that would have been interesting. But instead I think she was in love with a couple of other people that I write about in the book. And Henry James was gay, right? He wasn’t interested in women. So their relationship did become very close, and they spent a lot of time together — more so than any other women in his life at that time. But we do know that when they met in Florence in 1880, he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. It was going to be a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and he wrote to William Dean Howells and said, “Umm, I’m going to be a little bit late getting the next installment to you because of all of the distractions here in Florence.” It turned out that that was exactly when he met Woolson. We know that they started spending pretty much every day together. He was taking her to show her around the museums and the galleries and the churches. She was soaking up all of his knowledge about art, which she didn’t know a lot about yet. I think, and I wasn’t the first to point this out (Lyndall Gordon did in her book), that Woolson had a lot of similarities to Isabel Archer, the character he was writing about. The aspect of Woolson discovering Europe for the first time the way Isabel Archer does...learning about art and being sort of overwhelmed by it all...and over-awed, but also being independent. They had this great way of talking about that then; they called it a woman was “self-contained” if she wasn’t needing to be attached to a man, if she seemed to have her own sort of individuality. And that was a rare thing! That’s how James writes about Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. She was so remarkable because she didn’t seem to need to be attached to a man, and that is what Woolson had too. So I think he was gathering material for his book. At the same time, she was collecting material, too! She wrote this great story, A Florentine Experiment, that is drawn from that period of meeting Henry James.

AMY: So as fascinating as all this is when it comes to Woolson’s relationship with James (their friendship), I think we need to jettison him now from the conversation and let her stand in her own right for the rest of the podcast. So let’s talk about Anne, her novel. As Kim said, we kind of first chose it because of the fact that it was set on Mackinac Island, which I love, but once I dove into the book I realized there are so many different settings. In the same way, the plot is very winding and very inventive, to say the least. It’s a mash-up of a lot of crazy different things. I was beside myself with all the twists and turns in this book, especially the second half of this book.

ANNE: Yeah. I think she’s trying to do everything. It was her first novel. She spent many years writing it. So we don’t know what previous incarnations of it looked like, but I imagine she was developing her ideas over such a long period of time that when it came time to make decisions about the plot it was hard to give up some things, right? Hard for her to “kill her darlings.” And so in some ways, it almost feels like there’s too much going on, but really, I mean, Middlemarch is also a really sprawling book, right, where you have two protagonists and you have these parallel plots and all of this back-and-forth and twists and turns and, you know, in some ways it’s just a good old Victorian novel, Anne is. It was written for serialization in Harper’s, so a lot of the twists and turns would maybe be for the magazine readers, to keep them engaged month-by-month. It ran for a year-and-a-half in Harper’s, which was a crazy amount of time. Really, really long. They held it for two years before they published it. She was going nuts wanting this to be published. They wanted it to appear in their first trans-Atlantic issue, so it would be published simultaneously in the U.S. and in London. So she gained all this tremendous exposure in London and after that, all of her books were published there, too, and there were great reviews. Yeah, I thought of something about Henry James, but I won’t say it. But I do want to say one thing, actually, about Henry James. I think it’s really important to recognize this: His best-selling book of his entire lengthy career was Portrait of a Lady, that sold 6,000 copies, and that came out just a few months before Anne. Anne sold 57,000 — almost ten times as much as his book did. Yet Portrait of a Lady has never been out of print and probably never will be. It’s considered a masterpiece of literature. And I’m not saying that Anne is. I’m just saying, why was it completely forgotten? It was her most popular book. It was the book she was known for throughout her life. But after she died (and we can talk about that later, because we still want to talk about Anne) but yeah, to be so completely forgotten when it was such a popular book… I think there are some reasons for it, but it’s very unfortunate because it is such a good read! I taught that book many years ago in a course on the female bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. Boy, my students, they just loved it, and they were all upset that they all grew up reading Jane Eyre or George Eliot and Emily Bronte but hadn’t read this. Because it is kind of in that vein. Those are the sorts of writers who were influencing her.

AMY: That’s exactly what was running through my head. I kept thinking, “This is right on par with a Bronte novel.” And George Eliot came to mind, too. I felt a little indignant as I was reading it that I had been deprived. Like, I’m halfway through my life! I read the Bronte sisters when I was in eighth grade and I’ve had them in my life this whole time. Yet this is a novel that I’m just now finding out about. Where did she go and why? It’s crazy!

ANNE: Right, and I think when we’re young we do need books like this, because Anne is the sort of heroine that has that sort of presence, I think. She is a young woman who would stand out with Jo March and Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett. I think she would hold her own with those kinds of heroines that we all admire and adore. We can never have enough of them.

AMY: Kim, is this a good time to sort of pause and give a little overview of the plot for our listeners?

KIM: I think that’s a great idea. Just make sure you don’t give any spoilers, but a quick overview would probably help people.

AMY: This is a book that you do not want to read any summaries of before you dive in because the fun of the book lies in the shocking surprises that pop up. So you don’t want to know any of that ahead of time, but that said, here’s a little spoiler-free introduction: On Michigan’s remote, yet-idyllic Mackinac Island lives a kind, smart, and atypically beautiful young woman named Anne, who is orphaned and has to leave everything and everyone she knows and loves (including her beloved Mackinac Island) in order to make a living so she can support her half-siblings. And then, of course, adventures, including the romantic kind, ensue… 

KIM: Anne, would you like to read one of your favorite passages from that early part of the novel that’s set on Mackinac Island? 

ANNE: Sure! So, it really is a book to kind of just let yourself sink into. It’d be great, you know, to spend some rainy weekends on the couch reading this. It’s that kind of immersive book. But I think the opening is really kind of interesting. At the opening, she’s hanging up a wreath in the church on Mackinac Island, this remote place, and her father criticizes the wreath because it looks too perfect. It was looking too smooth and neat and nice. Too geometrical. It should be more natural-looking. And Anne says that she didn’t notice that. We’re introduced to Anne and she’s described: Anne, standing straight again, surveyed the garland in silence. Then she changed its position once or twice, studying the effect. Her figure, poised on the round of the ladder, high in the air, was, although unsupported, firm. With her arms raised above her head in a position which few women could have endured for more than a moment, she appeared as unconcerned, and strong, and sure of her footing, as though she had been standing on the floor. There was vigor about her and elasticity, combined unexpectedly with the soft curves and dimples of a child. Viewed from the floor, this was a young Diana, or a Greek maiden, as we imagine Greek maidens to have been. The rounded arms, visible through the close sleeves of the dark woolen dress, the finely moulded wrists below the heavy wreath, the lithe, natural waist, all belonged to a young goddess. But when Anne Douglas came down from her height, and turned toward you, the idea vanished. Here was no goddess, no Greek; only an American girl, with a skin like a peach. Anne Douglas’s eyes were violet-blue, wide open, and frank. She had not yet learned that there was any reason why she should not look at everything with the calm directness of childhood.

It’s just a wonderful description, isn’t it? I love that last line, too, because it’s like saying, you know, she hadn’t learned yet to be demure and proper and feminine. She was just being herself.

AMY: The book kept pointing out that she’s like this all-American girl, sort of from the wilderness almost, and she’s a goddess, but the characters kept describing her as not necessarily beautiful. And it kept making me laugh, because of course, all the men were falling all over her. But she had this unorthodox beauty that everybody had to remark upon, like, “She’s very plain, but in a beautiful way.”

ANNE: Right. I think at one point this analogy might be used. If not, it was used a lot in other literature of the time, that she would have been more like a wildflower whereas the other women around her later are more like hothouse flowers, greenhouse flowers. The perfect rose that has been cultivated in the hothouse, where she grows naturally on the side of the hill or something like that, right? So it’s that kind of beauty that she is meant to represent.

KIM: So we got to hear a little bit about what it was like when she was young and on the island, and then, she actually leaves. She ends up going to New York and she goes to a French finishing school. Her rich, misanthropic aunt sends her there. She’s this poor, provincial country girl, completely out of place in a totally new environment. It sounds like Woolson had a really similar experience in some ways. Can you tell us a little bit about Woolson’s experience?

ANNE: Yeah, there’s a lot of Anne in Woolson, or Woolson in Anne, I guess. She was also very physically active and physically fit and could row for a whole hour without her arms getting tired like Anne. Things like that. Woolson had a very unconventional education in Cleveland where she grew up, at the Cleveland Female Seminary. It was a sort of higher education for women. She went during her high school years and she learned all kinds of advanced science and math, geography, Latin and other languages, French and German, and she was learning literature. That’s when she began gaining praise and recognition from her teachers for her writing, but it was a very rigorous education. Very unusual for the time. That, apparently, wasn’t enough for her family. They didn’t feel quite comfortable sending Connie out into the world with a man’s education. They had to send her to a finishing school in New York, to top it all off. It’s just so incongruous, right? It’s a very severe education she had and then suddenly Connie’s family sent her to this finishing school that was filled with basically a lot of Southern belles. I think there were only a few northerners there. She felt way out of her element.

AMY: I can speak Latin, but I need to be able to sing these Italian arias and do embroidery, so I’m not complete yet, even though I’m smarter than most people in the room right now.

ANNE: She wasn’t “ornamental” enough for her day, so she had to get some finishing touches, yeah.

AMY: I really loved all the peripheral characters from Mackinac Island in that first section of the book, and that part of the book, especially, felt quintessentially “American” to me, because we had people from so many different walks of life. I was surprised at how much I really enjoyed some of the commentary at the beginning about religious faith. We have the Calvinist point of view, we have the Roman Catholics, we have the Episcopalians. Woolson writes about that in a really telling, and almost funny sort of way. These characters kind of hate each other because of that but then they also wind up coming together, rallying around Anne, and it kind of echoes the tribalism that we see a little bit today in our culture. I loved the fact that they came together despite their differences and was wondering if you knew anything about Woolson’s take on religion or what kind of commentary she might be making there.

ANNE: What she’s doing there, in some respects… she did have a tremendous interest in religion and was very, very well-read, so you see that coming out there. But what she’s also doing is commenting on the kind of regional differences that had kept Americans apart and had led to the Civil War. This is a post-Civil War book set in a pre-Civil War period. Actually, the war comes up later in the book, but her childhood in Mackinac Island is pre-Civil War. So Woolson’s writing at a time when the country is tired of division and they become extremely interested in all the different regions of the country and trying to explore them. So there’s this real boom of regionalist literature in the magazines. And she wrote a lot of stories from the Great Lakes region that were part of that movement, and from the South, as well, later when she went to the South. So she’s keenly aware. She’s actually living in the South when she writes this book, so she’s living in the midst of the aftermath of the war there. So this idea of division and tribalism is still very much on her mind because of that experience, but Americans are tired. I should say white Americans, northern Americans, are tired of talking about the Civil War, about all of the death that happened, and also about slavery and what’s happening with the freed slaves and whether or not they’ll have a place in America. All of those are questions that Woolson was very interested in and was told by publishers not to talk too much about because people were tired of that and wanted to move onto other things. (Which is why Reconstruction failed.) So I think she’s, in some ways, trying to encapsulate those tensions and divisions, maybe through looking at religion instead of region. I think it’s so fascinating that even though the book starts on Mackinac Island, she’s showing us, first of all, how diverse that region is, and then she takes her heroine and puts her on the road and she goes to all these different parts of America. This is an American novel and I think there was interest then, starting to be interest in the “great American novel,” right? Would we have a novel that kind of encapsulated this country? People were looking to their literature for a kind of great American novel, and I think Woolson had that sort of ambition when she wrote it, even though she was writing a book about a young girl becoming a woman. I think it’s so fascinating that she combined those two things together: tremendous literary ambition and this idea of a great American novel that would somehow encapsulate the country, through the figure of a girl. It’s something I’ve written a lot about in my work on Little Women. And this book is a big, big ambitious book, and if it doesn’t quite, if it didn’t quite become the great American novel, it was certainly greeted as a contender for that when it was published.

AMY: We see a lot of resilience and resourcefulness and independence in Anne Douglas in the novel. She’s determined to just do it by herself and make it on her own. And yet, she had some romantic relationships along the way. That is sort of the thing, I think, that makes this book, with all its twists and turns, a page-turner as well, because you’re trying to figure out who she’s going to end up with, if she’s going to end up with anybody. First we have Rast, who is her best friend from childhood on the island. They try to maintain this long-distance relationship. But then when she’s in society she becomes courted by these much more sophisticated suitors. I found myself completely wrapped up in that. Both of the main guys, Mr. Dexter and Mr. Heathcote, I found both of them quite swoon worthy at various points. I felt like both of them were doing a pretty good job at winning MY heart at least! But yeah, I think that contributed to the page-turner aspect of the book. But also, when you said it was serialized… I don’t think I knew that, and that makes a lot of sense because every chapter ends on such a cliffhanger moment. And I want to say I also really loved the intros to each chapter. She selected little passages from classic literature that kind of summarized what the chapter was going to be about. I really enjoyed that as well.

ANNE: It shows how well-read she was, and also, there’s a little bit of showing off going on there, right?

KIM: She’s earned it.

 ANNE: Yeah. It’s a mark of a serious work of literature, rather than just a magazine-ish kind of story.

AMY: I was expecting before I read the book that it was going to be a lot more schmaltzy than it actually was. You know, I’m so used to writers from that era sort of just dripping it on a little bit with the sentimentality. And there were moments of that in the book, but there wasn’t nearly as much as I expected. I found it was kind of modern the way it was written. It felt like it could have been written today.

ANNE: I think Woolson’s writing is incredibly modern. That was exactly the word I was going to use. It’s not particularly sentimental. I mean, she would have been horrified if anybody called her a sentimental writer. She thought that, unfortunately, most women writers wrote too sweetly and too sentimentally, and she said she wanted her writing to be strong and vigorous, even if that meant she was sacrificing her femininity as a writer. In fact, I mean this book is remarkable in that it’s about a girl because many many, many of her stories that she published — she was a very prolific short-story writer — so many of those are about a male protagonist. They’re written from a male point of view. We’ve been saying a lot about Anne before even getting to the fact that there are suitors and a potential love story here. It is not the main theme of the book. And even once she has realized who she’s in love with, he’s not even there for most of the rest of the story. It’s still about Anne, right, and her adventures and her finding her way to him, but also proving herself to be an independent person along the way.

KIM: Yeah, and female friendships are really important, too, not just the romantic relationships. She has a deep friendship with a wealthy young widow named Helen. It’s a really interesting portrayal of female friendship. They’re from two completely different backgrounds. They meet at the French finishing school. They’re singing partners. Anne becomes a little bit of a project for Helen, and reminds me a little bit of the Moffats and Meg in Little Women and Anne almost being her “pet,” but it became so much more than that. Their friendship had a lot more depth, and it was more than a minor subplot, it was kind of defining in the novel, what happens with them. I won’t say anymore about that, but…

AMY: I will say a little more about that without giving anything away, but we’ll just say that this friend, Helen, her story unfolds very dramatically in the book, to the point where I was gasping and I was a little ahead of Kim in my reading, and so I was texting her in all caps at certain points, like, “HANG ONTO YOUR HAT! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT’S COMING!”

ANNE: You won’t even see it coming.

KIM: No.

ANNE: So Woolson was a fan of the dramatic plot, and that was something I think that she was told by some people like William Dean Howells, the arch-realist, to tone it down. But she’s doing it, I think, because what she’s trying to convey is not just everyday life and women talking over tea and having a social call or what have you. She’s trying to put her characters in these dramatic moments to reveal their true character. She’s very interested in the moments in which the mask comes off, right? The social veneer comes down. All the social conventions go away because, “Oh my god, this is happening! We have to do something, now! It’s a crisis!” Or what have you. That’s how true feelings are revealed. They are only revealed under severe pressure like that. Woolson was somebody who cared about those kind of eruptive, volcanic feelings inside of us and how they come out under pressure, so that’s why you get sometimes these very dramatic… and they don’t feel like they’re manipulative or plot devices, because we see character revealed through them. It’s almost the revealing of a character that’s the real drama rather than the external event, would you say? Did you feel that way about it?

AMY: Yeah, but I also felt like it was just entertainment factor. It was like watching a movie. I could visualize everything. I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into some sort of miniseries or movie. I think it would be an excellent one. But those twists, and those dramatic cliff-hangers, I should say, sometimes literally… they were very cinematic to me, and it just drew me into the story even more.

KIM: So you’ve studied Alcott. You’ve studied Woolson. You’ve written books about them. Why has Little Women stood the test of time and Anne hasn’t? Not as many people know about Constance Fenimore Woolson.

ANNE: First of all, Little Women was a bigger success. It was so, so huge. And it was a book that girls read when they were young and carried with them through their lives and passed down to their own granddaughters or nieces or whatever, right? Anne never had that chance to become that kind of book. Partially, I think, because Anne was the only book like this that she wrote. Whereas Alcott, children’s writing became an industry for her and her publishers made new editions of the book: illustrated editions, right, to kind of crystalize its status as a “classic” and promoted the book tremendously. And then there started being adaptations starting with the Broadway play in 1920. Anne on the other hand, it became her signature book, her most important book, but by the time she died, she had written so many other kinds of things. She was a varied writer. She was a writer who had some many talents and so many interests. She wasn’t writing sequels to this, right? It wasn’t becoming a cottage industry for the publisher. It’s interesting to compare it to Little Women because I hadn’t really thought about that before. I’ve thought about it more as compared to a book like Portrait of a Lady. But no one would ever compare Little Women and Portrait of a Lady.

KIM: Good point.

ANNE: But in some ways, Anne kind of exists in that middle space in between, doesn’t it?

AMY: I was going to say when you mentioned the part about daughters enjoying Little Women when they’re girls. This isn’t that book. I mean, this is not so innocent. For that time period, it was a little bit of a scandal in certain sections.

ANNE: Oh, gosh. I need to go back and reread it. So there’s spicy parts? That would be interesting, because I can see the ways in which Alcott was deliberately toning that down in Little Women. So, I went and saw the manuscript. There are two manuscripts of Little Women that have survived, and if you compare them to the published book you can see how she’s cutting out potentially spicy parts, and showing the ways in which her little women are becoming women and inspiring lustful thoughts in men and that sort of thing. Maybe having feelings themselves. But you’re right, Woolson didn’t shy away from that. She wasn’t trying to write a story for girls the way Alcott was deliberately trying to do and had been asked by her publisher to do. This was meant to be, as I said, a great American novel, or a novel like Middlemarch or something like that. Like Jane Eyre. The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre were Woolson’s favorite books when she was growing up. Yeah. And you can definitely see their influence here. She was writing much less about a girl than she was writing about a young woman. I think it’s very telling that a book like Little Women that is more about girls from whom their sort of sexual essence that’s developing had been stripped, that is the book that has stood the test of time, rather than a book like Anne, where we see it developing, and Woolson’s not afraid to show that within the Victorian context within which it was written, but you feel it there. You feel the passion and the energy that Alcott couldn’t write about. Alcott did in other things, but not in Little Women. So I think that’s fascinating, actually, these questions about what survives and what doesn’t, and I think it has everything to do with our culture’s fear of women’s sexuality. I think that could really be part of it. 

KIM: What should we read next now that we love Anne?

ANNE: Well, as I said, she never read another book quite like Anne. I think you should read her short stories. She’s particularly masterful at the short story form and her stories are exquisite works of art, I think. And they’re in print. There’s a paperback edition that I edited and also the Library of America edition that I edited. Those are in print, so you can get your hands on those pretty easily. For other novels… For the Major was her next novel. It is much, much shorter. More of a novella, and has more of the qualities of a lot of her short stories. The kind of precision and narrow focus. They’re just exquisitely wrought. Anne feels sprawling and sometimes that like it might go out of control, right? But that’s part of what you enjoy about it. The next novel that she wrote after For the Major is East Angels, that, in some ways, scholars have thought of as a response to Portrait of a Lady. But it’s set in America in Florida. Yeah, you should read East Angels next, because there’s definitely quite a bit of this restrained passion happening, or suppressed passion that comes out in interesting ways. That’s kind of the theme of that book in many ways. So yeah, yeah, you should read East Angels next.

AMY: You had me at “restrained passion.”

ANNE: Yep.

AMY: I love it.

KIM: Yeah, I’m ready. We’re going to have to do another episode with that one. So, we have you here and you know all about these lost ladies of literature so you’re the perfect person to ask if you have any recommendations for other authors that we need to put on our to-read list.

ANNE: Yes. I actually have a list that I made for subscribers when you sign up to my newsletter. A list of what I think are the best forgotten books by American women writers. These are books that I’ve taught and my students have really responded to. So some of the books that I have on there are Fanny Fern ... The Morgersons by Elizabeth Stoddard… what else is on there? Well, some of them are more contemporary like Gayl Jones’s Corregidora which is, wow, a gut punch of a book. It’s amazing! Toni Morrison said that African American women’s literature would never be the same after that book. That was when Toni Morrison was an editor. She was an editor [on that book] at Random House. Another interesting one is Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. That’s a Harlem Renaissance book. She also wrote another novel, Passing, but I really like Quicksand because she goes to Europe in that book, and I just find that element of it fascinating. There are some other interesting late 19th century writers who didn’t write novels, but wrote stories. Sui Sin Far is an Asian American, Chinese-American writer and her stories are just wonderful, and Sikala-Sa, was the Sioux name of Gertrude Bonnin who wrote some really interesting stories about her own growing up that were published in The Atlantic Monthly. As well as Alice Dunbar Nelson who was a Creole woman from New Orleans. They’re just fascinating to learn about, these women writers of the 19th century. First of all, we’ve been brought up to think there weren’t very many women writers, right? There was George Eliot and Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Emily and Anne, but that was it, right, until we get to Virginia Woolf or something.

KIM: Yep.

ANNE: But whoa, wait a minute… there were a lot of them. And there were a lot in America, not just in England. And they weren’t all white. They weren’t all white, privileged women either. The writer I’m obsessed with right now is a 20th century writer who wrote about the World War II era. She was part of the Lost Generation in Paris, and then she didn’t come home when all the other writers came home. She stayed and witnessed the rise of fascism and the beginning of the war in France. Her name is Kay Boyle and I’m writing a book about her now. Her writing reminds me of Woolson’s, and that’s why I think I’m so drawn to her, because there’s so much empathy and passion in her work. She’s also very intense and dramatic, but also such an artist, you know? Just really an amazing, amazing writer.

AMY: I think I had a misconception for a long time that if a book didn’t withstand the test of time, there was a reason it didn’t. It was because it wasn’t very good. And now I realize that’s so not true, and that women have been shortchanged for whatever reason and I’m still trying to still get to the bottom of that a little bit, because it doesn’t make sense.

ANNE: Right. And this is what I studied in graduate school, or that’s why I went to graduate school and I was just so full of excitement to be part of this recovering women writers thing, right? All these women writers that were there… it was a very exciting time. And then, you know, I went out into the world and started teaching and you know, I just kind of naively assumed somehow that the rest of the world had caught up with me and that now people knew about these writers. My students kept coming to me year after year — it’s been 21 years now —  saying, “Who are these women writers? I thought there weren’t any women writers. I thought a book that didn’t stand the test of time wasn’t any good. Why have I never heard about Alice Dunbar Nelson or Tikala-Sun or Sui Sin Far or Constance Fenimore Woolson, for that matter?” And not only that, but at the same time that I’m hearing this over and over again, year after year from my students (who still aren’t getting it in high school and aren’t getting it from many of my colleagues that they’re taking literature courses from all over the country), at the same time, the works that were part of that first wave of recovery, that were republished like I mentioned that collection of stories which was my gateway to Woolson, Women Artists, Women Exiles, they went out of print because not enough people bought them. So we were getting them back into print, but they weren’t staying there.

KIM: I cannot imagine a better guest for this episode than you, and a better first guest for our podcast!

ANNE: She’s always been my favorite of that period, and I’m so thrilled that you all discovered her and that you’re sharing her with more readers.

AMY: Okay, so Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male BFF but still be lost in his shadow.

AMY: We also learned that in the 19th century you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy” unless you’ve graduated from finishing school.

KIM: And finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And we’re going to link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode.

AMY: So be sure to check out our mini episode next week, because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of the country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode.

KIM: Do you have ideas for other long-lost forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode as well as further reading material, you can check out our website: Lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference.

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into one of your new favorite authors. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

CLOSING: 

AMY: So, Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male bff, but still be lost in his shadow.. 

AMY: That’s for sure! In the 19th century, you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy”  unless you’ve graduated from finishing school. 

KIM: And, finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And speaking of, we’ll link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode. 

AMY: Be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten-track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of this country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

KIM: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference!

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[closing music.]

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes