SOURCE: "Editor's Introduction," in For the Major and Selected Short Stories, College & University Press, 1967, pp. 7-22.

In the essay that follows, Moore provides a general introduction to Woolson's short stories.

I

In her own day Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was popular with both public and critics. Many American and British readers read her work when it first appeared in Harper's New Monthly and other literary magazines, and incomplete figures from her publishers Harper and Brothers on the sale of eight of her twelve volumes show that more than one hundred thousand copies of these books were sold. Anne, her first novel, accounted for almost sixty thousand copies of this total.

The critics were also enthusiastic about Miss Woolson's fiction. A writer in the New York Tribune asserted that the author of Anne stood "without question at the head of American woman novelists"; a reviewer in the Century remarked...