By the time her first novel,
Anne,
appeared in the pages of
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine(December 1880-May 1881), Constance Fenimore Woolson had established a considerable reputation as a writer of short stories with a strong sense of locale, as is clear from her two collections
Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches(1875) and
Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches(1880). However,
Anne(published in book-form in 1882) did not match the quality of her short narratives, revealing a lack of control over the novel form which, more or less conspicuously, was to dog her every subsequent effort in that field.
At the outset of the novel the heroine of the title, Anne Douglas, is a girl on the verge of womanhood who lives with her twice-widowed father and four half-siblings (a girl and three
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Citation: Buonomo, Leonardo. "Anne". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6568, accessed 23 November 2024.]
