SOURCE: "Local-Color, Frontier and Regional Fiction," in The Rise of the American Novel, American Book Company, 1948, pp. 568-78.

In the following essay, Cowie studies Woolson's five novels and argues that their principal qualities are simplicity of plot, realism of character and dialogue, and precision of description.

An author able to elicit the high praise of so austere a critic as Henry James may be assumed to have mastered important elements in the technique of writing.⁸⁴ Praise from such a quarter would indeed for some people be presumptive evidence that the writer was more skilled than readable. Yet Constance Fenimore Woolson was not only an able craftsman but also in the 1880's and 1890's a popular writer, especially with that relatively superior audience comprised in part of readers of magazines such as Harper's, in which many of her stories first appeared. Her popularity of course has long since waned...