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.

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.

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.

Suffering from influenza and depression, she either jumped or fell to her death from a fourth story window in the apartment in January 1894, surviving for about an hour after the fall.

She was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and is memorialized by Anne's Tablet on Mackinac Island, Michigan,[3] and a niche with a slender silver trumpet vase in Christ Church in Cooperstown, New York.

Benedict then reprinted the second volume of the series, Constance Fenimore Woolson, in 1932 and added selected published and unpublished materials in "Appendix A."