Anne, first published in 1880 by author Constance Fenimore Woolson, is a work of American literary regionalism. It depicts the emotional and spiritual conflicts faced by its eponymous heroine as she leaves her home village, Mackinac Island, to seek a future as a young woman in the Northeastern United States. Her good qualities win her many suitors, but she finds hypocrisy and dysfunctional social relationships among the wealthier strata of U.S. Victorian society. Eventually she selects a suitor who, although of wealthy origins, has lost his means and is ready to accept the stolid virtues of the American working class. Anne Douglas returns with her new partner to her place of origin. [1] [2]
Constance Fenimore Woolson 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.
American literary regionalism or local color is a style or genre of writing in the United States that gained popularity in the mid to late 19th century into the early 20th century. In this style of writing, which includes both poetry and prose, the setting is particularly important and writers often emphasize specific features such as dialect, customs, history, and landscape, of a particular region: "Such a locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial." Regionalism is influenced by both 19th-century realism and romanticism, adhering to a fidelity of description in the narrative but also infusing the tale with exotic or unfamiliar customs, objects, and people.
Mackinac Island is an island and resort area, covering 4.35 square miles (11.3 km2) in land area, in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is located in Lake Huron, at the eastern end of the Straits of Mackinac, between the state's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. The island was home to an Odawa settlement before European colonization began in the 17th century. It served a strategic position as a center on the commerce of the Great Lakes fur trade. This led to the establishment of Fort Mackinac on the island by the British during the American Revolutionary War. It was the site of two battles during the War of 1812.
Anne was first published through serialization in Harper's New Monthly Magazine . [2] Upon republication as a book in 1882, [2] the work became a bestseller and was reviewed in The Nation , The Century , and other leading periodicals of the day. Many readers and reviewers appreciated the book, as it depicted a wide variety of settings and social circumstances, with a particular eye for the picturesque elements to be seen on the shores of northern Lake Huron inhabited by persons who had come to live in harmony with the ecology of the Great Lakes. Woolson's sentimental depiction of a rural setting was attractive to a readership increasingly tied to smoky, industrial cities.
In literature, a serial is a printing format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in smaller, sequential installments. The installments are also known as numbers, parts or fascicles, and may be released either as separate publications or within sequential issues of a periodical publication, such as a magazine or newspaper.
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, covering progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that closed in 1865, after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now that the specific, urgent problem of slavery had been ended, one could proceed to a broader topic, The Nation. An important collabator of the new magazine was its Literary Editor Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of William. He had at his disposal his father's vast network of contacts.
The Century Magazine was first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City, which had been bought in that year by Roswell Smith and renamed by him after the Century Association. It was the successor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine and ceased publication in 1930.
Anne was republished as a volume in 1882 by Harper and Brothers. Sales of the novel faded with changing literary tastes; Woolson admirer Anne Boyd Rioux confessed in 2014 that "self-sacrificing heroines like Margaret in East Angels and Anne in Anne seem almost impossibly good to our eyes today." [1] The work's copyright has expired and it is in the public domain in its country of publication, the United States. Anne's Tablet, erected on Mackinac Island in 1916, is a tribute to author Woolson and to Anne. [3]
The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
Anne's Tablet is an Art Nouveau sculptural installation located within Mackinac Island State Park adjacent to Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island. Consisting of stone benches and a bronze plaque, the overlook was built in 1916 as a memorial to local author Constance Fenimore Woolson.
