Jupiter Lights: Love and Turbulence: A Tale of Family Dynamics and Authenticity in the Late 19th Century

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

This 19th-century American novel is set partly in the Great Lakes region and in a South Carolina island. It is a passionate book in that it deals with tough subjects like domestic abuse, slavery and cruelty. Woolson was a well-known writer and her stories are gripping and intense.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction

116 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1889

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 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Set mostly on a South Carolina island and then the Great Lakes area in the specific year of 1869, this is a ‘rough’ book dealing with tough subjects: domestic abuse; cruelty; revenge; race relations (on a side note, though a strong one, is the attitude toward black men who are thought to have committed a crime based purely on circumstantial evidence). No matter our modern sensibilities about such issues as women choosing to stay with abusive partners, these topics remain relevant. Also 'rough' in that the reader gets the ending she likely ‘wants,’ but it comes at a big cost (especially for a 21st-century reader): a realistic deflation, not a triumph (romantic or otherwise).

If Margaret of East Angels is repressed passion, Eve Bruce is her antithesis, which is not to say she doesn’t also have a strong moral compass. And while East Angels is an analytical novel (my preference), Jupiter Lights is nonstop action (What that poor baby goes through!) with nary a chance to catch your breath. Its depiction of a delusional, alcohol-fueled mental illness may seem melodramatic (some of the action borders on the sensational), but it is all too real. Once again, Woolson seems unafraid, choosing to contrast women (older, virginal and Southern) who either ignore or are ignorant of ugly truths (the men are complicit in covering for each other) with other women (younger, passionate and outsiders) who see all and love in spite of what they know.

Also of note is the quirky Hollis, a slouching, slang-speaking non-practicing lawyer, and owner of an auction house possessing a skeleton and six bonnets. Hollis could be a precursor to the best-friends-forever character in a John Hughes movie: comic relief while carrying an obvious and unrequited love.

I suppose it’s not likely that Faulkner read this novel, yet I thought of him on page 30:

“…you are the most extraordinary people in the world, you Southerners; I have been here nearly a month, and I am still constantly struck by it—you never think of money at all. And the strangest point is, that although you never think of it, you don’t in the least know how to get on without it; you cannot improve anything, you can only endure.” [Emphasis mine]

Within five more words is the name of a black servant: Dilsey.

[Janet Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m probably being too harsh in my rating. I read this because the author’s relationship with Henry James made me curious. I didn’t really like the story or the writing. I do g think it has stood the test of time very well at all.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eva Bruce is a 'pale, cold, and stern' young woman, devoted to her brother Jack, who left her in England to fight in the American Civil War, settling down thereafter in South Carolina, marrying a young girl and having a child, given his father's name.

When Jack Bruce tragically dies of yellow fever, Eva travels back to the country of her birth to take her nephew away from his flighty, childishly cruel mother Cicily, who has already married again, to a charming man named Ferdinand Mortimer, but one prone to drunken, violent fits.

This is a situation fraught with difficulties, which only intensify as Eva ends up staying with her brother's step-family longer than expected, becoming further embroiled until tragedy inevitably results. She soon finds herself committed for more than just young Jack's sake.

Jupiter Lights has a powerful premise and an entirely unsentimental narrative. The characters are all very real and not entirely likable in their imperfections. The prose is sparse and flinty, with barely a hint of the melodrama that frequently ruins such stories.

As a background, the American South in the years immediately following the Civil War is unsparingly depicted, highlighting the tensions and resentments brought about by defeat and the ending of slavery, where patrician whites still feel superior to the emancipated blacks, yet no longer hold the whip hand, legally at least.

Essentially the novel becomes a love story, but not at all a warm or conventional one. I can well imagine many readers being alienated by the repressively spartan tone, but I was strangely captivated by it.

[JodiP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my second Woolson. She writes about such interesting people. This was the story of Eve, who travels from England to South Carolina, where her brother had been living. He had died, leaving a wife and son behind. Eve is very attached to the son, and wants to take him away. Her sister-in-law is quite bizarre and has already re-married. her husband drinks and physically abuses her. One night, Eve, Cicely and the baby flee. Eve shoot Ferdie (the husband) and they go to stay with Ferdie's brother Paul. Eventually, Even and Paul fall in love. Meanwhile, Ferdie seems to be recovering from the gunshot, which locals believe was done by two black men. Even is haunted by herr actions. Ferdie then takes a bad turn, and dies. Eve, believing hse has killed Paul, eventually confesses. Paul claims he will love her nonetheless, as he knows how "difficult" Ferdie could be. She takes off for Italy. Meanwhile, Paul is told by the doctor that Ferdies' wound was completely healed and he died of alcohol poisoning. Paul tracks Eve down and the book ends with her falling into his arms.

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

More interesting sidelights by Woolston on marriage, women, men, and the post-Bellum South. At times the period conventions about madness (and there is at least one more mad person than the obvious one in this book) threaten to make it unreadable, and it has occasionally the same air of padding pages to satisfy a publisher's requirements that I detected in Anne. But if you just surrender to the conventions of the past, the novel can be both revealing and satisfying.