THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY NOVELIST: Constance Fenimore Woolson's Daring Literary Life

Accessibly written, superbly researched and full of deep sympathy for its subject, Rioux's biography (the first of this fascinating woman) will resonate with many Jamesians and those curious about a writer widely regarded as the American peer of George Eliot.

Today Constance Woolson is primarily known as a close friend of Henry James and the model for Isabel Archer in his Portrait of a Lady. However, in her own time Woolson was a more commercially successful writer than James himself, widely read and reviewed, and remarkable for her independence and ambition. In this biography, Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Orleans, reconsiders this author's life, her books, and the meaning of her relationship with James. Drawing on a never-before-published series of letters between Woolson and a close friend of the family, composer Francis Boott, Rioux shares the untold stories behind Woolson's fiction: her life as a single woman in New York City; her travels to the Reconstruction-era South, throughout Europe, and to Egypt; her struggles with depression and romantic heartbreak. ANNE BOYD RIOUX is Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Orleans, where she teaches courses in American and Women's Literature. She is also President of the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. She is the author of Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of American Literary Culture in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and the editor of Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).