Solomon

Solomon

Constance Fenimore Woolson was born 1840, in Claremont, NH. Three older sisters died from scarlet fever soon after Constance's birth, and the family decided to move west to start a new life. They relocated in Cleveland, Ohio, where Constance grew up. She attended Cleveland Female Seminary, and finished off her education at a fashionable boarding school in New York. Woolson acquired a taste for travel at an early age. She accompanied her father on business trips throughout Ohio and Wisconsin, her family vacationed on Mackinac Island, where they owned a summer cottage, she went to school in New York, visited Cooperstown, and toured New England. On these trips, Woolson encountered a variety of regional types and terrains--her keen eye for place and her interest in cultural differences would later find expression in her fiction and travel pieces. The Civil War was the central event of Woolson's young adulthood, and became for her an emotional fulcrum against which she measured later times. She called it "the heart and spirit of my life" in letter to her friend Edmund Clarence Stedman, and remarked that "everything has seemed tame to me since." She eventually wrote a number of stories set in the Reconstruction South; these often hinge on the strong feelings evoked by the War and are some of her most emotion-laden works. By the War's end, Woolson already assumed she would never marry. In 1869 her father died; the following year Woolson became a steady contributor to literary magazines. She had written for her own amusement since childhood, but now she began to write seriously, and to think of herself as an author. Her pride in her kinship to James Fenimore Cooper, her mother's uncle, perhaps helped her from the first to envision writing as an artistic calling, not a business venture. Woolson was a literary success almost from the start, and soon her stories, poetry, and sketches were appearing regularly in periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's. Her best early work were stories set in the Great Lakes region; many featured characters who lived lives of isolation in inaccessible wildernesses. Woolson's detailed descriptions of landscape and a tough-minded realism put her in the ranks of early local colorists such as Bret Harte, whose fiction she greatly admired.