Constance Fenimore Woolson

Born in Claremont, New Hampshire, in 1840 and raised mostly in Cleveland, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the notable American writers of the late nineteenth century. She was a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, but she built her own reputation through novels, short stories, poems, and travel writing.

After doing hospital work during the Civil War and beginning to publish more seriously after her father's death, she gained attention for fiction set around the Great Lakes and in the American South. Later she lived and traveled in Europe, and those experiences shaped some of her best-known later work about Americans overseas.

Woolson died in Venice in 1894. Although her name is not as widely known now as it once was, readers and scholars continue to return to her writing for its memorable settings, careful observation, and insight into loneliness, independence, and ambition.