East Angels

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

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Genres: Fiction, Classics

482 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1886

About the author

Constance Fenimore Woolson (March 5, 1840 – January 24, 1894) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. She was a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, and is best known for fictions about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and American expatriates in Europe.

Woolson was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, but her family soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio, after the deaths of three of her sisters from scarlet fever. Woolson was educated at the Cleveland Female Seminary and a boarding school in New York. She traveled extensively through the midwest and northeastern regions of the U.S. during her childhood and young adulthood.

Woolson’s father died in 1869. The following year she began to publish fiction and essays in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. Her first full-length publication was a children’s book, The Old Stone House (1873). In 1875 she published her first volume of short stories, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches, based on her experiences in the Great Lakes region, especially Mackinac Island.

From 1873 to 1879 Woolson spent winters with her mother in St. Augustine, Florida. During these visits she traveled widely in the South which gave her material for her next collection of short stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). After her mother’s death in 1879, Woolson went to Europe, staying at a succession of hotels in England, France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

Woolson published her first novel Anne in 1880, followed by three others: East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889) and Horace Chase (1894). In 1883 she published the novella For the Major, a story of the postwar South that has become one of her most respected fictions. In the winter of 1889–1890 she traveled to Egypt and Greece, which resulted in a collection of travel sketches, Mentone, Cairo and Corfu (published posthumously in 1896).

In 1893 Woolson rented an elegant apartment on the Grand Canal of Venice. Suffering from influenza and depression, she either jumped or fell to her death from a window in the apartment in January 1894. Two volumes of her short stories appeared after her death: The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896). She is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and is memorialized by Anne's Tablet on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Woolson’s short stories have long been regarded as pioneering examples of local color or regionalism. Today, Woolson's novels, short stories, poetry, and travelogues are studied and taught from a range of scholarly and critical perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic, gender studies, postcolonial, and new historicism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this a week ago. I usually write a review right away but hadn't felt able to, even less able to move on from the novel itself.

At its start, with the description of the house in Florida, I felt as if I'd been transported to St. Augustine. (I visited in 2007 and it doesn’t seem to have changed much from this post-Civil War time period.) With the comparison of European and Southern skies, I was reminded of how the blue sky of Italy felt so much like the blue sky of home (New Orleans), except for Rome's being cloudless. When a character thinks To her Florida was Florida. America? That was quite another country, I discovered that’s how I feel about Florida too, that it’s not even really of the South.

Woolson makes full use of her “exotic” setting, including a journey into the heart of a labyrinthine swamp, a journey that elucidates for the reader the hearts of her two main characters. One of them is only introduced after several chapters, which plays to Woolson’s way of thwarting expectations.

She does some similar thwarting with the introduction of a plot point a la George Eliot when, innocently and beyond their control, an opposite-sex 'couple' are out all night together. Almost immediately the expectation is quashed, yet when another character is later reading Adam Bede I felt Woolson had given me a sly wink.

(Speaking of Eliot, this passage …even so good a man is more earnest (unconsciously) in his hopes for the happiness of a bride with eyes and hair like Garda's...Though the relation...between the amount of coloring matter in the visual orbs or capillary glands, and the degree of sweetness and womanly goodness in the heart beneath, has never yet been satisfactorily determined brought to mind Maggie Tulliver.)

I miss the diverse cast of characters. Even the minor ones—some of whom are unintentionally very funny, which especially comes through in the dialogue—are complex. Consistent with her empathy for all (even one that drove me crazy), Woolson restores individuality to a certain female character, insisting on her birth name at the time of and after her death, discarding the mask the woman wore during her marriage and mother/widow-hood. Another perhaps ‘radical’ moment comes when a very young woman says to an older male character, "the only thing you tried to do was to 'mould' me”, contradicting a justification of the time period for May-December marriages.

The ‘older’ woman who develops into a main character has become close to my heart and for that reason alone her story gets an extra star. The power of her silence and then her cri de coeur will stay with me. In some novels, the silence of a character feels inorganic and leads to an unnecessary misunderstanding that frustrates me as a reader. That’s not the case here: the character’s principled silence is her strength, as well as being to her detriment.

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating picture of post-Bellum Florida, the role of women in 19th century life, and of women in the period. Some of the characters seem almost unbelievable in modern terms but as you read you are transported into an age in which they seem possible and they become intriguing rather than exasperating. Very evocative.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in 1885, you can see Woolson's writing developing in parallel with Henry James' here. The novel begins as something of an extension of her short story "Felipa," but it quickly sprawls out to encompass a much wider cast of characters. As the novel continues to progress the traces of regionalism are increasingly replaced by hyper-conscious society-romance (a la James). By the second half of the novel Garda's love story, so central in the first, is superseded by another. The Florida landscape nonetheless continues to play an important role, entangling pairs or groups of characters in uncertain-yet-thrilling intimacies removed from the order of former plantation mansions. Woolson critiques male privilege, class privilege, excessive restraint, and excessive liberty. The trouble with East Angels is that it is quite long (my edition clocks in at just under 600 pages of small print) for a novel that seems at once to cover so much ground (it never quite decides what is of central importance) and so little (its plot episodes, generally concerning the same three characters, become repetitive).