Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson

Author:Constance Fenimore Woolson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

“MISS GRIEF”

WOOLSON’S FIRST EUROPEAN STORY, “‘MISS Grief’” was written sometime after her departure from the United States in December 1879, when she was still grieving the death of her mother earlier that year. It marks the transition from her identity as a dutiful daughter, writing to support herself and her mother, to that of an independent artist living in Europe. Although the story is set in Rome, Woolson had not yet visited that city. Nor had she met Henry James, who shares many superficial similarities with the story’s narrator. Woolson had a letter of introduction from James’s cousin and had gone to his home in London almost as soon as she arrived, but he was out of the country. “‘Miss Grief’” suggests the complex feelings she had as she anticipated making his acquaintance. Above all, Woolson hoped for a mutual recognition of their disparate strengths as writers. (Her writing was known for its originality and force, his for its exquisite polish.) She pointed up their differences in her portrait of a poor, starving woman writer who has been unable to publish (unlike Woolson herself, whose writings were well regarded) approaching a successful male writer who has everything he could desire, simply because, he realizes, his style of writing is preferred by the public and the gatekeepers of the literary world. “‘Miss Grief’” was first published in Lippincott’s in May 1880 and chosen by Scribner’s for volume four of its Stories by American Authors, published in 1884.

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