SOURCE: "The 'Immeasurable World of Print': The Short Fiction," in Constance Fenimore Woolson, Twayne Publishers, 1963, pp. 41-50.

In the essay that follows, Moore discusses Woolson's first collection of short stories and examines its increasingly sophisticated character development.

Constance Woolson's first contributions to the great national magazines were descriptive articles in the guise of fiction. She wrote of the Zoar Community in the Tuscarawas Valley of Ohio, of Mackinac in the far north of the Lake country, and of Lake Otsego near the ancestral home of the Coopers. Gradually she began to concentrate more on her characters and less on description, though she never lost her concern for setting and background even after she had lived for years in Europe. Her first sketches and stories dealt, with few exceptions, with the country she knew best—the Great Lakes area, Ohio, and New York. Later, after she had lived for...