In an essay published in Harper’s Weekly (1887), and later included in Partial Portraits (1888), Henry James described Constance Fenimore Woolson’s collection Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880) as “the fruit of a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analysed”. Particularly praiseworthy, in James’s view, was the sensitivity with which Woolson had responded to the “voicelessness of the conquered and reconstructed South”, and her “compassionate sense of this pathetic dumbness”. Indeed Woolson, a northener who had come to know the South intimately as a result of her sojourn there from 1873 to 1879, had found in that region abundant material for her fiction and travel writing. The stories included in Rodman the Keeper had previously appeared in...
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Citation: Buonomo, Leonardo. "Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2337, accessed 05 December 2025.]
