Miss Grief and Other Stories [Paperback]

Constance Fenimore Woolson (18401894) was one of the few nineteenth-century women writers considered the equal of her male peers. Harper & Brothers was so enamored of her work that the firm agreed to publish whatever she could write. In this gathering, Rioux has chosen fiction over the course of Woolsons life, including In Sloane Street, never published since it first appeared inAn American realist of a high order. . . . The writing in all of [Woolsons stories] is remarkably good, but it is the American stories that will send the reader looking for more of Woolsons work.With a forward by T?ib?n and an introduction by Rioux, this volume carefully sequences seven of Woolsons notable stories. . . . It is striking just how accessible Woolsons style is throughout. . . . As Riouxs work has made plain, Woolson proved her detractors wrong.[Woolson was] more than the smitten confidante of Henry James. . . . Solomon and St. Clair Flats are particularly fine, meticulously delineating the natural beauty of eastern Ohio and the Great Lakes Region.Woolson's writing was never better than when she was grappling with the ambivalence of men like [Henry] James toward women like herself. . . . Her short stories demonstrate irony, force and feeling that occasionally surpass the stories of Edith Wharton and Howells, rivaling 'the Master' himself even as they take aim directly at his privilege and presumptions.Like Jane Austen, Woolsons protagonists knew and understood their place within the rigid social ladder of acceptable convention, and her portraits are vivid, picture perfect snapshots of that time and place . . . Rioux reintroduces an American master of regionalism and local color.A potent . . . [and] exciting volume. . . . These finely-crafted, place-rooted stories are startling in their mythic atmosphere, vital descriptions, and elegiac tributes to lost worlds. They are charged with a quietly ferocious tension between old-fashioned structures and the plS6