Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship - Paperback

by Kathleen Diffley (Editor), Caroline Gebhard (Editor), Cheryl Torsney (Editor)

The eighteen essays in this volume explore Constance Fenimore Woolson's prodigious range in period and genre as well as place, from the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean. The whole of her professional life comes alive in this enlightening collection's triptych.

The first section, "A Writer's Experiments," reveals that Woolson's play with familiar genres and unfamiliar characters began during the 1870s and extended until she died in 1894. Consistently, she tested the limits of representing women's labor and their erotic desires.

The second section, "Postbellum Souths," follows Woolson's travels through a land ravaged by war and injustice. Drawing on theories of travel, collective memory, the Lost Cause, religious controversy, and a race-bound region, these essays expose both the smugness of visitors and the agendas of residents that Woolson was among the first postwar writers to portray.

The third section, "Through an International Lens," considers expatriate perceptions of European and Mediterranean cultures as well as misconceptions about the Gilded Age United States. Here and throughout this volume, responses to Woolson's travel sketches mingle with assessments of her fiction and poetry, while her encounters with the writing of other Americans demonstrate how regularly Woolson made her century's literary terrain more subtle and complex.

Author Biography

Kathleen Diffley (Editor)
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861-1876 (Georgia) and editor of Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894.

Caroline Gebhard (Editor)
CAROLINE GEBHARD is professor emerita at Tuskegee University. She is a founding member of the Woolson Society and coeditor of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919.

Cheryl B. Torsney (Editor)
CHERYL B. TORSNEY is program manager for leadership and career studies at Temple University. A founding member of the Woolson Society, she is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry and the editor of Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson.