SOURCE: "Island Fortresses: The Landscape of the Imagination in the Great Lakes Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson," American Literary Realism: 1870-1910, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1990, pp. 51-66.

In the following essay, Brehm contests the idea that Woolson is either "a failed realist or a failed sentimentalist" and argues that Woolson's writing reflects her own conflicts and renunciations as a female author.

Henry James noted only two "defects" in Constance Fenimore Woolson's 1889 novel Jupiter Lights: "One is that the group on which she has bent her lens strikes us as too detached, too isolated, too much a desert island…. The other fault is that the famous 'tender sentiment' usurps among them a place even greater perhaps than that which it holds in real life…. "¹ Although James rightly spotted two unresolved problems in Woolson's work, he did not understand that there was a connection between them, nor could he have perceived...