Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship

The eighteen essays in this volume explore Constance Fenimore Woolson’s prodigious range of place, from the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean. Her achievements come alive in this enlightening collection, shedding light on the full scope of her professional writing career.

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, accounts of Woolson’s travel sketches mingle with those 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.

Kathleen Diffley (Editor)
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus at the M/MLA. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876 and the coeditor of Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (both Georgia). She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Caroline Gebhard (Editor)
CAROLINE GEBHARD is professor of English at Tuskegee University. She is a founding member of the Woolson Society and co-editor (with Barbara McCaskill) of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919. She lives in Auburn, AL.

Cheryl B. Torsney (Editor)
CHERYL B. TORSNEY is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry and co-editor of Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. She lives in Philadelphia, PA.