It’s not often that you encounter in a novel a secondary character who has hearing loss, and whose hearing loss is incidental to her role in the story.

In Colm Toibin’s brilliant 2004 novel “The Master,” about Henry James, he writes from James’ perspective about Henry’s deep friendship with the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who was a popular novelist in the mid to late 19^th century. James was also American but lived most of his life in England and Italy, as did Woolson. James was a social being, Woolson an introvert. She also had substantial progressive hearing loss.

As I read Toibin’s fictional passages about Woolson, I was struck by his descriptions of her hearing loss, as seen by James. See if any of these passages resonate with your experience.

• “Her deafness appeared to irritate her, and once they had been together a short time, she seemed compelled to withdraw.”

• Constance was “forced to incline her right ear towards him when he spoke, so that she could hear him.”

• “Henry was fascinated by her refusal to be introduced to James’ friends and associates in the higher echelons of Florentine society. She needed her evenings to herself, she said flatly; she could not happily absorb the company of so many people, no matter how rich and important they were.”

• “Her hearing deteriorated and when he spoke, she had to study his face and watch his lips to follow what he was saying.”  After her death, Henry remembered the way her own lips “moved quietly as he spoke to her, how desperately, despite her bad hearing, she tried to follow what he was saying.”

Woolson suffered from clinical depression and this, rather than her hearing loss, is the characteristic usually cited for her social isolation. Toibin frequently mentions her depression, her “loneliness and melancholy.” But he, like others, focusses on her depression without making a connection to her hearing loss. “The completion of each of her books brought with it a nervous collapse of which she lived in dread,” Toibin writes. “The winters were not kind to her; dark days and low temperatures made her depressed so that there were times when she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anybody else, could not work, and could, as far as he could discover, see no hope, although she was desperate for him not to know the scale and depth of her suffering.”

Constance had no access to hearing aids or cochlear implants. The best device would have been an ear horn, although no mention is made of it. She didn’t have the benefit of support groups like The Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA), the Association of Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA), the Say What Club and other organizations. She didn’t have online support groups like the Facebook page “Hearing Loss: The Emotional Side.” She didn’t have access to the many books and blogs that today help us cope with hearing loss.

Woolson died at age 57 in the dreary January of Venice. She fell or jumped from her bedroom window. James believed it was suicide. He felt remorse that he had not traveled to Venice when she asked him to come. His biographer Leon Edel wrote that the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson’s death were such that “we can read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters” and from his writing in subsequent years. Toibin portrays James as sympathetic, but others judge their relationship more harshly. “Betrayed by Henry James” was the title of a 2016 article about Woolson in The New Republic.

Those of us with severe hearing loss know how important a social network is in healthy aging, but many of us also know that our disability can be an obstacle to being part of an active social life. Woolson’s hearing loss no doubt contributed to her isolation. Her isolation likely contributed to her depression. Toibin’s observations about Constance’s hearing loss are astute, sympathetic, and heartbreaking. 

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For more about hearing loss, read my books: “Shouting Won’t Help,” “Living Better with Hearing Loss,”and “Smart Hearing,” available at Amazon.com.