SOURCE: "Constance Woolson's Southern Sketches," Southern Studies, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Fall 1986, pp. 274-83.

In the following essay, Dean praises Woolson 's sensitivity to the complex position of women in the South which is evident through her fictional accounts of Southern society during Reconstruction.

Constance Woolson was not a Southerner. Born in Claremont, New Hampshire, on March 5, 1840, she moved that winter to Cleveland where she lived, aside from schooling in New York and summer visits to Mackinac Island, Michigan, until her first of many extended visits South in 1873. From 1873 to 1879, she spent much of her time in Florida, Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Georgia, and from 1879 until her death in 1894, she lived in Europe, particularly in Italy. Typically writing about the places where she lived and visited, Woolson published her stories in regional collections: Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches (1875), Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1888), The Front Yard and Other...