SOURCE: Walker, Cheryl. “Profile: Rose Terry Cooke, 1827-1892.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 9, no. 2 (fall 1992): 143-49.

[In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of Cooke's career as a prolific writer of realistic short stories and romantic poetry.]

At least two Rose Terry Cookes command our attention a hundred years after the historical woman's death. One, the writer of realist short stories, has long been recognized as a pioneer of New England regional fiction, an innovator in the use of dialect, and the forerunner of works by Rebecca Harding Davis and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others.¹ This Rose Terry (as she was known until her marriage to Rollin Cooke in 1873) wrote the lead story for the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly, published in 1857. In New England: Indian Summer (1940) Van Wyck Brooks praised her early efforts, saying “some of these tales, with their note of harsh veracity, were never to be replaced by later authors; and as tales, in their bleak finality, two or three—“Too Late” and “Some Account of Thomas Tucker”—were all but beyond comparison” (88). In 1982 Perry Westbrook's profile of her for the Dictionary of Literary Biography made an assessment of Cooke's status typical of American literary historians: “Not all of Cooke's approximately 200 published stories are realistic, but a number of them rank with the best realistic fiction of such New England authors … as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman” (95). More recently Cooke's realist fiction has been taken up and praised by feminist critics, among them Josephine Donovan and Elizabeth Ammons, whose introduction to the Rutgers volume of Cooke's stories (1986) commends Rose Terry Cooke for her ear for dialect and dialogue, her eye for detail, her dramatic sense of plot, and, above all, her honesty in depicting the harshness of nineteenth-century women's lives.

This Rose Terry Cooke does indeed deserve the recognition she has been receiving since 1967, when Jay Martin wrote that her work had been unjustly ignored by most historians of American literature. However, there is another, quite different Rose Terry Cooke, whose compositions have been misunderstood and dismissed while the realist writer has prospered. This is the romantic Rose Terry, best encountered in her first volume of poems (1861). Whereas the presiding spirit of Cooke's realist fiction is temperate, decent, honest, practical, warm-hearted, and ready to praise such Yankee virtues as “faculty” and hard work, this other, impulsive spirit luxuriates in indolence, passionate sexuality, extreme and even cruel emotions, strange poses, and fantasies of terror. Hardly respectable by nineteenth-century standards, she was politely ignored by the critics and has remained virtually unknown ever since.²

It is intriguing that Cooke's second persona was almost immediately buried and has remained so until now. Elizabeth Ammons does go some distance in unearthing the romantic Rose where she recounts a conversation Cooke had with Harriet Spofford about Anne Terry, Cooke's mother. In this conversation, Cooke said: “My mother was nursed by a gypsy, and in her were the oddest streaks. Severer in her Puritanism than ever I was, there was a favorable wildness about her” (Spofford, Book of Friends 155-56). Ammons comments, “In Anne Terry's mixture of orthodoxy and abandon—her struggle between fears and fightings—and in the daughter's yearning for this mother, the wild one with her passion for the out-of-doors and her disregard for authority, lies much of the energy of Rose Terry Cooke's most searching fiction” (xiv-xv). Yet even Ammons dismisses Cooke's poetry and concludes that Cooke was “conventional when it came to matters of taste or even most moral issues” (xix).

Looked at through the dusty lens of the extant biographical material, Rose Terry Cooke's life would certainly seem to confirm Ammons's view.³ Her background, for instance, was thoroughly respectable. Born on a farm near Hartford, she had distinguished grandparents on both sides, linking her family to federal, state, and local government, banking, insurance, and the shipbuilding industry. Though her father, a landscape gardener like Lydia Sigourney's, was financially unstable, the family was able to move to her grandmother Terry's mansion in Hartford when Rose was six, and she retained extremely fond memories of this house with its lavish holiday rituals and efficient management.

Even Cooke's education and religious orientation were typical of her time, class, and aspirations. She graduated at sixteen from the Hartford Female Seminary (taught by a student of Lydia Sigourney's) and obtained work as a schoolmistress and governess. She also joined the Congregational Church, giving the evidence of conversion necessary for church membership at that time. In 1848 she received the first of her inheritance from her favorite uncle, Daniel Wadsworth, who incidentally had also assisted Sigourney many years earlier by paying to have her first poems published. With this small but reliable income, Rose Terry was able to give up teaching and work on her writing.

Her outward life was hardly objectionable. She took care of her aged parents as they weakened and eventually died. For a time she lived with her sister, but a breach with her brother-in-law (and the eventual death of her sister) severed relations, despite her continuing devotion to her nieces. As Rose Terry she published a good deal, both stories and poems, in the 1850s, but the following decade seems to have been a dry period, possibly due to the ill health she suffered from all her life. In 1882 Cooke wrote to Horatio Nelson Rust in California: “I congratulate you on escaping from our New England climate which I must still endure though I think every year I will migrate if I have to walk! so much do I dread the rheumatic and neuralgic pains that rack me every winter” (Huntington).

Probably the most impulsive and unconventional thing Rose Terry ever did was to marry Rollin H. Cooke when she was forty-six and he was thirty. Her family frowned upon the connection, apparently feeling that Cooke (whose wife had died, leaving two daughters) had neither the means nor the background to be worthy of Rose. And indeed he proved unreliable as far as finances were concerned. Following one profession after another—bank clerk, genealogist, real estate agent—he never made a go of any of them, and Rose was often under pressure to “boil the pot,” as she put it, by selling her literary productions to those magazines that paid soonest. Increasingly, these were children's magazines and parochial outlets rather than Harper's, Putnam's, and the Atlantic Monthly, where she had placed much of her earlier work.

It is tantalizing to reflect upon this marriage about which we know very little. In A Little Book of Friends (1916) Harriet Spofford gives us this account: “Mr. Cooke was devotedly attached to her, and thought nothing that she did could be bettered. He was a very attractive and lovable man, witty himself and the cause of wit in others, always interesting and always good natured, and their relation was quite perfect” (147).⁴ Similarly, Cooke herself wrote to Rust after nine years of marriage: “I have a good husband—one of the best—and a pleasant home: things peculiarly pleasant to me, so long baffled and storm-tossed” (Huntington).

Yet the strong-willed and home-loving Rose could not have brooked lightly the loss of her house and all her inheritance by her husband and father-in-law. After that they were perennially on the move. In 1889-90 she spent the winter in Boston, hoping to find work and waiting for Rollin to close his business in Pittsfield. However, it seems he never joined her there; in fact, she returned to Pittsfield, and two years later she died.

In 1878 she jotted down a cryptic little poem, beginning: “Is it better late than never, / Or better never than late?” (Alderman). This question is taken up again in one of her best late stories, “How Celia Changed Her Mind” (1892), which concerns an old maid who decides that life as a spinster is a misery, until she marries and discovers that life with a bad husband is worse. Cooke did not believe in divorce, so whatever her real feelings about her marriage, she was bound to make the best of it.

Making the best of it is what one heroine after another does in Cooke's realist short stories, which are often chilling in their portrayal of the married state. Celia herself perseveres until her husband dies and she is freed. In “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” a marvelously ungentle tale, Lowly Mallory is worked to death in a marriage to a husband who despises her for giving birth to girls. Here Cooke describes the condition of humanity as “not peace and rapture, but discipline and education” (How Celia 86). Cooke portrays New England culture as particularly devastating for women in the late 1700s and early 1800s, so often the period of her tales. Women's lives are barren, filled with endless work, and wives are subject to the whims of their husbands: “Conjugal subjection was the fashion, or rather the principle and custom of the day, and was to be upheld in spite of facts” (How Celia 120). In “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” Mrs. Flint's friends try to use such facts to defend her decision to leave her husband, but the town sees her as wayward and excommunicates her.

Not all is dismal in Cooke's stories, however, which explains why she was so popular in her day and why her novels (Steadfast, Happy Dodd, and No—all moralistic) seem so tedious by comparison. If one were to ask what happened to the wild, outrageous Rose Terry in later life, the answer would seem to be that, though muted, she continued to find outlets in unguarded textual moments, in humor, and in fantasies of violence.

One such unguarded moment occurs in the midst of “A Double Thanksgiving,” where Cooke suddenly breaks into the otherwise controlled narrative to give vent to her own night terrors. Having just told us that her heroine did not dream (“she was too healthy, too practical”), Cooke produces a sentence that goes on for a page, beginning: “But we who dream, who rehearse every sorrow in new and ghastlier form; who recall the dead, with their averted eyes and alien speech …” (Huckleberries 246). And so it goes for some 160 words, until Cooke returns to the plot with a new paragraph: “So day by day the winter wore away for Sally.”

In a lighter vein, Rose Terry Cooke was beloved by her friends for being a raconteur; she spoke quickly with much emphasis, was a wonderful mimic, and had a caustic wit. Writing to Mr. Ticknor (of Ticknor and Fields) in 1886, she remarks:

If I had not a great deal of vanity I would send you my photograph but “it is for your own good” as my mother used to tell me, that I refrain. I don't mind so very much about the homeliness, but the fact is none of them really give anybody an idea of me, because I am an effusive talker and my face is never still. Once in my life Mr. Cooke insisted on my having a photograph taken for a dreadful book about women.⁵ I had two made, christened “the senile grin” and “acetate of lead.” They took the last⁶ and the book never sold except out in Polynesia.

(Downey 107)

Cooke's sardonic humor here clearly preserves a degree of extreme feeling otherwise softened. “The Memorial of A. B., or Matilda Muffin” (Legacy 2:2, 80-82), “Miss Beulah's Bonnet,” and “How Celia Changed Her Mind” provide similar examples.

Probably the most striking aspect of Rose Terry Cooke's unconventional side, however, is the amount of violence in it. One would think she wrote about violence in order to condemn it. In “The Ring Fetter,” Abner Dimock hurls his own child from a fast-moving carriage. Alonzo Jakeway in “Clary's Trial” is allowed to visit his cruelty upon at least two helpless females. Yet in “Mary Ann's Mind,” the hero is applauded for forcing Mary Ann to give him an answer: he carries her off in a rowboat and sets her down on a desert island until she becomes utterly cowed. The narrator in “Miss Lucinda” also takes an indulgent view toward “obedience training,” remarking: “‘Women and spaniels,’ the world knows, ‘like kicking’” (How Celia 168).

Yet these aspects of Cooke's realist fiction are mere hints of a gothic sensibility that comes through much more forcibly in her early poetry, a sensibility that clearly perplexed readers of her day. Her poems were quite different from those of most other women poets, and several readers mention not fully understanding what the poems mean. Others tried to force the poetry into the common mold, praising it for “exquisite delicacy of feeling” and “refined and tender expression” (Tribune) when in fact the speaker in “Fantasia” toys sadistically with her power, “Semele” is consumed by lust, and “Blue-Beard's Closet” taunts the world with its secret complicity in the murder of women. Among her later poems, “In the Hammock” stands out as a text that refuses to moralize about its unregenerate heroine, whose cheerful indulgence of her own sexuality goes uncontested.

Rose Terry Cooke published a great deal of literature (much of it for children) that today seems merely written to code. However, her remarks about what makes good writing for children (extracted here) supply an example of her independent spirit. In forming a judgment of her talent, one should give greatest emphasis to her best work, remembering what she wrote at the end of her essay on Harriet Prescott Spofford:

Women who are driven by the necessities of their lives to write, as others are to sew, to teach, or to nurse, do not cease their labors till the pen drops from their weary hand, and the exhausted brain refuses to feed the laboring fingers. “Work! work! work!” is not only the “Song of the Shirt,” but the song of the Woman, and under that stringent cry we reel off pages of fiction, overridden by the dreamy facts of need, like the spider, spinning not only our dwellings, but our grave-clothes from our own breasts.

(Our Famous Women 538)

Notes

1. In fact, Cooke's reputation, though minor, has held firm in the twentieth century. Fred Lewis Pattee in The Development of the American Short Story (1923) affirmed the originality of Cooke's local color stories. In the 1940s Robert Spiller et al.'s Literary History of the United States accorded her a key role in New England realism. And even before Cooke was reclaimed by women's studies, significant work was done on her in the 1950s and 1960s by S. A. Toth, Jay Martin, and Jean Downey.

2. The most influential readers of Cooke's poetry have, one and all, ignored how truly bizarre some of it is. James Russell Lowell's review of the 1861 Poems in the Atlantic, while acknowledging that the “Frontier Ballads” are gamey and “quiver with strength and spirit,” finds most of the volume “over-informed with thought and sadness” (382). Harriet Spofford was troubled by the feeling that the poetry was not as fine and noble as her friend, but like her contemporaries she fell back on praising “The Two Villages,” a purely conventional set piece. Jean Downey, whose dissertation has been unusually influential, describes Cooke's poetry as mostly sentimental, misty, and derivative (except for the Western ballads), a view that has prevailed.

3. Virtually all modern discussions of Cooke's life are based upon three sources: Jean Downey's dissertation, Harriet Spofford's A Little Book of Friends, and the essay on Cooke by Spofford in Our Famous Women.

4. One might surmise that Spofford is simply covering up the real situation by sentimentalizing a bad marriage. However, it is worth noting that in her chapter on Celia Thaxter (whose marriage was particularly difficult), Spofford carefully avoids saying anything about the relation between Levi Thaxter and his wife. In fact, she subtly suggests criticism of Celia Thaxter's husband.

5. The book mentioned here was Our Famous Women.

6. Apparently, Rose Terry Cooke was photographed only twice. Both pictures are in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. …

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth. Introduction. How Celia Changed Her Mind and Selected Stories. By Rose Terry Cooke. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986. ix-xxxv.

Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer, in Literature in New England. Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1944.

Cooke, Rose Terry. Letter to Horatio Nelson Rust. 26 Dec. 1882. Quoted by permission. Special Collections, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

———. Letter to James T. Fields. Quoted in Downey.

———. “Is it better late than never?” Unpublished poem, dated 14 Sept. 1878. Used by permission. Barrett-Cooke Collection, Alderman Library.

Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition. New York: Ungar, 1983.

Downey, Jean. “A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke.” Diss. U. of Ottawa, 1956.

Lowell, James Russell. Review of Poems. Atlantic Monthly 7 (March 1861): 382.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, et al. Our Famous Women. Hartford: A. D. Worthington, 1886. Includes “Harriet Prescott Spofford” by Cooke and “Rose Terry Cooke” by Spofford.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. A Little Book of Friends. Boston: Little, Brown, 1916.

Unsigned review of Poems from the Tribune, 19 Jan. 1861. Quoted in Literature: A Weekly Magazine (16 Mar. 1889), 366-70.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976.

Selected Bibliography

Archives

Rose Terry Cooke's letters and unpublished manuscripts are scattered in collections throughout the country. Large collections are located at the Connecticut Historical Society, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, and the Library of Congress.

Selected Primary Works

How Celia Changed Her Mind and Selected Stories. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986.

Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891.

Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861.

Poems. New York: Gottsberger, 1888.

Root-Bound and Other Sketches. Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1885.

Somebody's Neighbours. Boston: Osgood, 1881. Rpt. The American Short Story Series, vol. 41. New York: Garrett, 1969.

The Sphinx's Children and Other People's. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1886. Rpt. The American Short Story Series, vol. 42. New York: Garrett, 1969.

Steadfast: The Story of a Saint and a Sinner. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1889.

Selected Secondary Works

Downey, Jean. “Rose Terry Cooke: A Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibliography 21 (1955): 159-63, 191-92.

Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.

Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Literature. New York: Pageant, 1959.

Kleitz, Katherine. “Essence of New England: The Portraits of Rose Terry Cooke.” American Transcendental Quarterly 47-48 (1980): 127-39.

Makosky, Donald R. “Matred and Tamar, a Drama.” Resources for American Literary Study 14 (1984): 1-58 (includes a play by Cooke and commentary).

Martin, Jay. Harvest of Change: American Literature 1865-1914. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967.

Newlyn, Evelyn. “Rose Terry Cooke and the Children of the Sphinx.” Regionalism and the Female Imagination 4 (Winter 1979): 49-57.

Toth, Susan Allen. “Character Studies in Rose Terry Cooke: New Faces for the Short Story.” Kate Chopin Newsletter 2 (1976): 19-26.

———. “Rose Terry Cooke.” American Literary Realism 42 (1971): 170-76.

Westbrook, Perry D. Acres of Flint: Sarah Orne Jewett and Her Contemporaries. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1951. Rev. ed., 1981.

———. “Rose Terry Cooke.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 12 (American Realists and Naturalists). Detroit: Gale Research, 1982.