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“... Constance FenimoreWoolson’s​ fiction is little read these days, and she figures primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, in which she appears as a lonely spinster with an ear trumpet and an unrequited passion for her fellow novelist, speculation over the closeness of her friendship with James and the motives for her suicide has dominated accounts of her ...”

“... of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the American writer, Constance FenimoreWoolson, James’s intermittent companion and occasional fellow lodger for over a decade, who apparently committed suicide by hurling herself from the window of her Venetian apartments in the winter of ...”

“... Zeena’s but Mattie’s is as chilling as any that fiction has to offer. As in Wharton’s case, Constance FenimoreWoolson’s close friendship with Henry James may have done more to obscure the nature of her literary achievement than to clarify it. Certainly Woolson herself was ...”

“... asked him gently for help.’ But the great denial in Tóibín’s book involves James’s friend Constance FenimoreWoolson, an American novelist just as queer as he was in one sense and perhaps not queer enough in another. Tóibín lists Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James among the books that helped ...”

“... sedulously cultivated aims. Things do happen to him in Author, Author, not least the suicide of Constance FenimoreWoolson, the grand-niece of Fenimore Cooper, who was fruitlessly in love with him, and the abject failure of his play. But we do not get to know ...”

“... one set-piece has James taken by a gondolier to deposit the clothes of his newly deceased friend, Constance FenimoreWoolson, in the Venetian lagoon. Nancy’s trip to Dublin to be fitted for a dress for her daughter’s wedding is less dramatic but Tóibín gives it five pages all the same. And Eilis is a remodelled ...”

“... that this second happy marriage might rejuvenate the Master’s art. It is hard to believe that Constance FenimoreWoolson, the American novelist Edel contends was secretly in love with James, ‘would know exactly where this most eligible bachelor of literary London stood on the subject of marriage’ after reading ...”

“... Minny Temple, who inspired the heroines of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, and the writer Constance FenimoreWoolson, whose tangled intimacy with James provoked some of his most celebrated short stories. Like his sister Alice, Tóibín says, James ‘recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of ...”

“... end of the century he would often find himself standing in the cemetery at the grave of his friend Constance FenimoreWoolson, who committed suicide in Venice in 1894; her grave was close to those of the sculptor William Wetmore Story, about whom he would write a book, and John Addington Symonds, on whom he would base ...”

“... been unable to love. Clearly, he has been unable to love May Bartram, as James was unable to love Constance FenimoreWoolson; and it is open to readers whether or not they believe that May has understood all along something Marcher cannot entertain. He may have failed to love her because he was gay. And because he ...”

“... particularly, that – presumably by suicide – in Venice of his much-liked and loving friend, Constance Woolson (‘Fenimore’). The sense of betrayal, of shock and outrage, at what there seemed to be of incrimination in her death leaves him without his usual manner, bewildered and defensive. Even while she was ...”