Constance Fenimore Woolson

“In this eloquent and deeply researched biography, Anne Boyd Rioux draws the portrait of a nineteenth-century ‘lady novelist’ who challenged the era’s trivialization of women writers and bias against female literary ambition. Bursting out of the Jamesian frame, Constance Fenimore Woolson comes alive as an artist and a woman.” (Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx)

“Biography at its best aims at resurrection. Anne Boyd Rioux has brought the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson back to life for us. Hurrah!” (Robert D. Richardson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism)

“I’m so glad Anne Rioux has brought Constance Fenimore Woolson to our attention. This is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings to light a wonderful nineteenth-century writer―sophisticated, eloquent, and powerful―who should be much more widely known. I hope this book will make that happen.” (Roxana Robinson, author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life)

“A fine work of scholarship and biographical narrative. Rioux has researched her topic exhaustively and written a compelling narrative. Her work should do much to bring attention again to Woolson’s undeservedly neglected life, career, and writings and to establish an accurate assessment of Woolson’s relationship with Henry James.” (Pierre Walker, coeditor of The Complete Letters of Henry James)

“Anne Boyd Rioux tells her compelling story of Constance Fenimore Woolson with force and power, the very qualities once ascribed to Woolson’s own fiction. This is a beautifully researched biography of a talented American writer with a lively intellect and ambitious heart, a woman nonetheless inexorably caught in the crosshairs of nineteenth-century womanhood. The denouement, though not entirely a surprise, is devastating.” (Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life)