According to Fred Lewis Pattee, during the 1870s Constance Fenimore Woolson "was the most 'unconventional' feminine writer that had yet appeared in America." Woolson's fiction of the 1870s and 1880s places her among the female local colorists, whose stories were replacing the sentimental and effusive fiction of the first generation of American women writers. As Ann Douglas Wood has noted, "Constance Fenimore Woolson, a descendant of James Fenimore Cooper and a friend of Henry James, began her own career in declared hostility to her rhapsodical sisters." Woolson's early stories appeared in major periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Monthly, Harper's New Monthly, the Galaxy, and Appletons' Journal. These stories were so successful that after the publication of "Rodman the Keeper" in 1877 Harper and Brothers asked "whether or not it would be possible" for her to send all the stories she wrote to them. "The Native Element in Fiction," an...