Online English Test

As the south was beginning to find itself after the American Civil War, the North, too, focused its interest on the lands below the Mason-Dixon line. Northerners swarmed over the South: journalists, agents of prospective investors, speculators with plans for railroads, 5 writers anxious to expose themselves to a new environment. One of these was Constance Fenimore Woolson, a young woman from New Hampshire, a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, who like many Northerners, was drawn to the unhappy South by affection, compassion, admiration, or the charm of the life there. With her singular gift of minute 10 observation and a talent for analysis, her imagination lingered over the relics of the ancient South, the quaintly emblazoned tablets and colonial tombs, the wrecked old mansions that stood near by, perhaps in ruined rice lands amid desolated fields and broken dikes. Such was the dwelling on the Georgia sea island that sidled and leaned 15 in Jupiter Lights with one of its roofless wings falling into the cellar. After St. Augustine, Charleston especially attracted Miss Woolson, crumbling as it was but aristocratic still.

In a later novel, Horace Chase, one of the best of all her books, she anticipated Thomas Wolfe in describing Asheville, in which the 21 young capitalist from the North who falls in love with the Southern girl sees the " Lone Star " of future mountain resorts. Miss Woolson was a highly conscious writer, careful, skillful, subtle with a sensitive, clairvoyant feeling for human nature, with the gift of discriminating observation that characterized Howells and Henry James. She was surely 26 best in her stories of the South, fascinated as she was by its splendor and carelessness, its tropical plants flowers, odors and birds, and the pathos and beauty of the old order as she saw it in decay.