It’s the birthday of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a 19th century American writer who until recently was less remembered for her serious literary fiction than for her connections to Henry James and to her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper. Thanks to a recent biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (2016) by scholar Anne Boyd Rioux, and perhaps to the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society, Woolson’s work is again receiving attention.

Woolson was born in 1840 in Claremont, New Hampshire, into a well-off family and very soon after her birth lost three older sisters to scarlet fever, a tragedy from which her mother never recovered. (Point of interest: scarlet fever, as we discovered quite by accident last summer, is nothing more than strep + rash. Long live antibiotics.) The family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and Woolson was educated at the Cleveland Female Seminary and later a French finishing school in New York. She knew other advantages as well: she had connections to the publishing world through a brother-in-law who co-owned a Cleveland newspaper. After her father died in 1869, Woolson began a writing career in earnest.

Traveling with her mother throughout the East and the South, Woolson set many of her stories in these locations, including “Rodman the Keeper,” about a former Union soldier in post-Civil War North Carolina at the deathbed of a Confederate soldier. She had an extraordinary ability to bring these settings to life. But though she was publishing widely in the finest literary markets (such as The Atlantic Monthly), Woolson constantly experienced bias as a woman. As Rioux said in an interview, “Throughout her career, really, she was accused of writing too much like a woman and not enough like a woman. She couldn’t win, really” (historyinthemargins.com, March 11, 2016). Rioux claimed that she learned while writing the biography that conditions haven’t improved much for women writers today; Jonathan Franzen is lauded for writing domestic novels, while women are downgraded for same.

After Woolson’s mother died in 1879, she moved to Europe and published her first novel, Anne, in 1880. She also became close friends with Henry James. There’s been much speculation on the nature of their relationship; what does seem clear is that he was a negative influence on her later work. Woolson died in Venice in early 1894 when she either jumped or fell from her apartment window. She had been distressed by illness, money issues, and the completion of a fourth novel. James, grief-stricken, took her dresses out in a gondola and tried to “drown” them with a pole in a Venetian lagoon.

Some of Woolson’s stories have been republished in a 2016 collection, Miss Grief and Other Stories, curated by Rioux.

Have a good Monday (seriously? It’s Monday again?) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.