Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) is remembered for work that demonstrates an authoritative sense of place. No matter where she was, in the United State or in Europe, where she lived later in life, she wrote from the point of view of the outsider discerning local mores and in that sense mirrored her close friend Henry James. Indeed, her work was often in conversation with his, and her story “In Sloane Street” not only parodied the narrator of James’s “The Lesson of the Master” but also offered a feminist view of marriage and artistic success. A grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, she was born in New Hampshire and raised in Ohio. Memorable work includes the collection Miss Grief and Other Stories and the novella For the Major.


Read Henry James’s
“The Lesson of the Master”


And Cynthia Ozick’s essay
on James’s classic work

In Sloane Street

A Story

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

“Well, I’ve seen the National Gallery, and that’s over,” said Mrs. Moore, taking off her smart little bonnet and delicately drying with her handkerchief two drops which were visible on its ribbons. “And I think I’m very enterprising. You would never have got Isabella to go in such a rain.”

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