The Old Stone House

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Genres: Classics

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1873

About the author

Constance Fenimore Woolson (March 5, 1840 – January 24, 1894) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. She was a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, and is best known for fictions about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and American expatriates in Europe.

Woolson was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, but her family soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio, after the deaths of three of her sisters from scarlet fever. Woolson was educated at the Cleveland Female Seminary and a boarding school in New York. She traveled extensively through the midwest and northeastern regions of the U.S. during her childhood and young adulthood.

Woolson’s father died in 1869. The following year she began to publish fiction and essays in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. Her first full-length publication was a children’s book, The Old Stone House (1873). In 1875 she published her first volume of short stories, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches, based on her experiences in the Great Lakes region, especially Mackinac Island.

From 1873 to 1879 Woolson spent winters with her mother in St. Augustine, Florida. During these visits she traveled widely in the South which gave her material for her next collection of short stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). After her mother’s death in 1879, Woolson went to Europe, staying at a succession of hotels in England, France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

Woolson published her first novel Anne in 1880, followed by three others: East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889) and Horace Chase (1894). In 1883 she published the novella For the Major, a story of the postwar South that has become one of her most respected fictions. In the winter of 1889–1890 she traveled to Egypt and Greece, which resulted in a collection of travel sketches, Mentone, Cairo and Corfu (published posthumously in 1896).

In 1893 Woolson rented an elegant apartment on the Grand Canal of Venice. Suffering from influenza and depression, she either jumped or fell to her death from a window in the apartment in January 1894. Two volumes of her short stories appeared after her death: The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896). She is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and is memorialized by Anne's Tablet on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Woolson’s short stories have long been regarded as pioneering examples of local color or regionalism. Today, Woolson's novels, short stories, poetry, and travelogues are studied and taught from a range of scholarly and critical perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic, gender studies, postcolonial, and new historicism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Teresa]

In need of income, Woolson wrote this story for a contest riding on the popularity of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Alcott herself had despaired at one point of having to write “moral pap for the young,” yet this surpasses Alcott’s own writings in that regard. To be fair, though, it is exactly what the Christian sponsors of the contest wanted.

It’s the story of a widowed aunt raising her five nieces and nephews due to the deaths of their three sets of parents. How to deal with and think of death are main themes and were certainly informed by the losses Woolson herself had suffered.

My favorite exchange came near the end of the book between the oldest (male) cousin and Bessie, a Jo-like character. Hugh tells Bessie her paintings should never bear her name for sale, stating a belief of the time that a woman’s name should appear in public only on the occasions of her marriage and her death. Bessie replies: ”So if she don’t marry, she never has a chance of being anybody until she is dead; I don’t call that fair, Hugh.” He then asks if she’s “shrieking for suffrage” and Bessie responds: "I’m only shrieking for my name.”

Speaking of names, I was amused at an older character’s mystification at a trend of substituting the letter ‘y’ for ‘i’ in traditional first-names in “magazine-stories”, Vivian becoming Vyvyan and Willis becoming Wyllys. For today’s readers, this is another nothing-new-under-the-sun lesson.

Again, speaking of names, Woolson wrote this under the pseudonym of Anne March—a tribute to Alcott. She won the contest but wasn’t awarded all the money, as it was split between her and another author. Woolson never claimed this book under her real name.

[Julia]

This 1873 novel tells the tale of Mrs. Faith Sheldon and the five orphaned nieces and nephews she has struggled to raise up into lives of patience, good works, and sincere faith. Their trials and temptations are hers, and their triumphs God's. It is a story very, very steeped in Christian moralizing and Victorian pathos, a story very much of its era, and if that is not to your taste, I cannot recommend you read it. If, however, you find such things moving and inspiring, well, have I got a story for you!

Relatively few scanning errors make it easier to read than many of these old books, and the inclusion of various humorous scenes, stories, and jokes (including plenty of puns, most of which require a fairly solid literary and linguistic background to understand, so if you don't "get" them, don't feel ashamed; either Google or move on) keep it from feeling too heavy overall, despite the emphasis on sermonizing. Those who are paying attention will find the ending rather ham-fistedly foreshadowed, while at the same time other plotlines seem to be hinted at, but never fully fleshed out. Of particular amusement to me was a passage in which one old-timer decries the modern fashions in naming -- for example, outlandish spellings with too many "Y"s -- which I found to be a delighful reminder that people are people, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. See? I guess there's a moral here for everyone!