Woolson, Constance Fenimore - Victoria Brehm (essay date 1990)
Victoria Brehm (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "Island Fortresses: The Landscape of the Imagination in the Great Lakes Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson," American Literary Realism: 1870-1910, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1990, pp. 51-66.
[In the following essay, Brehm contests the idea that Woolson is either "a failed realist or a failed sentimentalist" and argues that Woolson's writing reflects her own conflicts and renunciations as a female author.]
Henry James noted only two "defects" in Constance Fenimore Woolson's 1889 novel Jupiter Lights: "One is that the group on which she has bent her lens strikes us as too detached, too isolated, too much a desert island…. The other fault is that the famous 'tender sentiment' usurps among them a place even greater perhaps than that which it holds in real life…. "1 Although James rightly spotted two unresolved problems in Woolson's work, he did not understand that there was a...
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