In the last weeks of the summer of 1882, as she was preparing to leave Baden-Baden for London (then Paris, then Florence), Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote Henry James that “there never was a woman so ill-fitted to do without a home as I am.” She was, according to her biographer Lyndall Gordon, “‘nervous’ and homesick, hauling her memorabilia and the spoils of travel from place to place.” Her items included:

her tear vase

her collection of ferns

a picture of yellow Jessamine (her favorite flower)

a weighing machine

a stiletto from Mentone

etchings of Bellosguardo and a red transparent screen used there

a 1760 edition of the poems of Vittoria Colonna

seven old prints bought by [her great-uncle James Fenimore] Cooper in Italy which a cousin had given her together with the original contract between Cooper and his publisher, G.P. Putnam Sons

an engraving of Cooper

a copper warming-pan from Otsego Hall given to her by one of Cooper’s daughters, Mrs. Phinney

and a photograph of her cherished niece, Clare, which she hung in every room she occupied

This image of Woolson, turtle-like, carrying a heavy home on her back is both appropriate and misleading. “Fenimore,” as James familiarly called her, could be acutely nostalgic in some moods and, in others, as adventuresome as her namesake. Although she spent most of her working life in Europe, no places are evoked so consistently across her fiction as the Great Lakes region and the American South. Her characters are stubborn individualists and intrepid explorers, always venturing into uncharted territory or navigating natural wildernesses.

She had horror of daintiness. In her prose, she aspired to a style muscular enough to impress itself on a reader, flexible enough to turn on a dime from domestic scenes to shipwrecks or chase sequences, and sturdy enough to bear transplanting to different settings and situations. For James, fiction was a house; for Woolson, it was closer to a well-stocked tent, bulging slightly with keepsakes and mementos but ready to be picked up at a minute’s notice.

In recent decades, Woolson has been the object of a lively tug-of-war among scholars and critics, although this has not been the kind of attention, it’s safe to assume, that she would have hoped for. The contradictions of her life and the circumstances of her violent death—in 1894, she jumped from the three-story window of her Venice apartment—have been studied primarily for what they suggest about James: whether he belittled or respected her abilities; whether he refused her subtle advances; whether he privately acknowledged her severe depression; whether his lack of attention hastened her death. In her influential triple biography of James, Woolson, and Minny Temple, Gordon accused the male novelist of masking his own complicity in Woolson’s suicide by widely spreading misleading accounts of her “perversity” and dementia. (“She was not, she was never, wholly sane,” James wrote one of their close mutual friends, the composer Francis Boott, after Woolson’s death: “I mean her liability to suffering was the doom of mental disease.”)

Woolson’s wholly secondary status in current American literary studies would have seemed strange to her contemporaries. As Rioux points out in Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, her new biography of Woolson, Woolson was herself widely studied and critically celebrated in nineteenth century America. Rioux sees Woolson as the novelist Isabel Archer might have become had she inherited “the ambition of her creator, with the desire not simply to make her life a work of art but to make art from her life.” Yet even Woolson’s champions tend to emphasize her ambition, rather than celebrating the works themselves. What are Woolson’s books actually like? Did she write as she traveled, with inspiring boldness but heavy, dragging steps? Or did her fiction—five novels and dozens of stories produced over a period of 25 years—measure up to her own high standards?