Posterity is the brutal mechanism that determines literary oblivion. Its gears are silent and insidious: the decline of the tone of an epoch, its trappings of idiom and taste; a modernist impatience with landscape and interiors; the hierarchical preferences of critics and biographers above all. It is to Leon Edel, then, the peerlessly influential biographer of Henry James, that we are mainly indebted for residual traces of the forgotten career of Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-94), a novelist and a contemporary of the Master.

Source: Wall Street Journal July 17, 2020 14:37 UTC