SOURCE: Ammons, Elizabeth. Introduction to “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories, by Rose Terry Cooke, pp. ix-xxxv. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Ammons discusses Cooke's popularity in the nineteenth century as a writer whose short stories record the hardships of women's lives and the cruelty of their fathers, brothers, and husbands.]

Rose Terry Cooke is unfamiliar today. That was not the case one hundred years ago when there seemed to be an abundance of women eager to pose as the popular New England regionalist. One such impersonator, a magnetic Christian zealot who dove into trances that provoked wild admiration, declared that it was she who had created all of the writer's stories, under the nom de plume “Rose Terry” (a name she claimed to have from a little cousin who died in childhood), and that every penny of the fortune she had amassed from her literary labors had gone to educate poor girls. The landlady of this flamboyant Rose Terry wrote in indignation to Harriet Beecher Stowe:

“Dear Madam,—I call upon you to silence the base reports spread about here concerning a lovely Christian woman at present staying with me. A line from you, stating that she is the author of the works written under the signature of Rose Terry, will stop the rumors at once, and much oblige yours truly.”

Stowe replied that she had known Rose Terry all her life, that the author did not live in Pennsylvania but Hartford, and that the good woman's boarder was an impostor.¹

Echoing the Pennsylvania hoax, a different woman, seated beside the sister of a friend of Cooke's on a railway car, quite coolly detailed the next book that she—the great author Rose Terry—planned to write, while two other pretenders surfaced in New York, one volunteering her services to a Sunday school (where she never showed up), the other trying to fool and impress a tourist by dropping the titles of stories and poems she had supposedly written. Still another operator, working the rails between Hartford and New York and posing as one of the author's intimates, not only took up with one of Cooke's friends, but also took off with the friend's pocketbook. But perhaps the most brash was the young woman who sat down on a train next to Cooke herself and proceeded to describe how she had composed this story or that and how she felt about all the praise and money that followed. (Cooke, a woman who could be caustically funny and outspoken when need be, reportedly remained silent, whether out of embarrassment or pity we do not know.)

Why these women impersonated Cooke is in some ways easy to understand. In the second half of the nineteenth century Rose Terry Cooke was a well-known author. She was a success. Women could look to her as an ideal.

When the new Atlantic Monthly came out in 1857, the lead story in the first great issue had been written by Rose Terry. One of only two women to have fiction appear in that historic number of the magazine, she went on to publish her sketches and stories regularly in the leading publications of the time: the Atlantic, Harper's, Putnam's, Galaxy. William Dean Howells, grouping her with Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Brown, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, gave her work high praise, saying of Cooke's New England fiction that her “stories [were] always so good that I grieve to have them the least forgotten” (234). In this century Ima Honaker Herron has declared in The Small Town in American Literature that the “real pioneer of the New England school of realism was not Mrs. Stowe, who sentimentalized about the past, but a Connecticut villager … Rose Terry (later Mrs. Cooke)” (80). In Harvests of Change Jay Martin insists that “Mrs. Cooke's work has been unjustly ignored by historians of American literature. … More clearly and astutely than Mrs. Stowe and long before Garland or Howe, she treated the story of rural decline, the tragedies of heroic characters whose brand of heroism no longer has any function and so sours into incredible meanness. … Her analysis of the tragedy of New England character was shrewd and decisive, establishing the conventions to be followed by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, and even Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost” (140-41). That various obscure women in the nineteenth century wished to trade places with this important writer reflects on Cooke's accomplishment in her own era. Perhaps by association an ordinary woman could feel what it was like to have visibility, recognition, respect.

Yet still we might ask why. Why did such a motley assortment of women—a religious zealot, a thief, a would-be Sunday school teacher, and a handful of frustrated artists—decide on Rose Terry Cooke as their heroine (or target, as the case may be)? The answer, I think, is that they saw themselves—twisted, disguised, transplanted—in her fiction. She seemed to understand them, so why shouldn't they, in turn, get inside of her? For Rose Terry Cooke was above all a teller of women's stories. Women's anger, dreams, fears, repressions, small pleasures, occasional triumphs, and countless defeats, these were Rose Terry Cooke's subject. Moreover, it is intriguing that, like the women who wanted to get inside her experience, she in turn, to tell the stories she found most compelling, sought to penetrate the lives of women at some distance from her, women in rural New England one and two generations before her own.

Like Hawthorne or Stowe, Cooke was fascinated by Calvinist New England. She did not always write about that subculture. One of her stories, “A Hard Lesson” (The Continent, 1884), dramatizes the evil of slavery and is set in the deep South part of the time; in others (two of which open this volume) it is the landscape of the psyche rather than of any specific geographical region that interests Cooke. But these are unusual. Most of her best and all of her most characteristic fictions examine life in rural New England during the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries. In her lifetime, in addition to publishing poetry, stories for children (appearing principally in the Christian Union and The Youth's Companion), and a couple of undistinguished novels, Happy Dodd (1887) and Steadfast (1889), Cooke produced more than one hundred pieces of short fiction, many of which she collected into four anthologies: Somebody's Neighbors (1881), Root-Bound (1885), The Sphinx's Children and Other People's (1886), and Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1892). In particular she rendered with a realism unprecedented in American fiction the lives of women trapped by poverty and male tyranny.

How much of this subject matter came from her own experience, individual and familial, is hard to determine. There is no full-length biography of Rose Terry Cooke, and the major published sources that do exist—Harriet Prescott Spofford's Our Famous Women: Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (1884) and A Little Book of Friends (1916)—are short and protective. Many questions that we might wish to raise we cannot answer on the basis of existing published biographical material. Who were the models for the cruel father figures and husbands in Cooke? What was the character of the marriage of her sister (to whom she was very close)? Was it “happy,” or was it a source for the many debilitating domestic arrangements we find in her fiction? And how do we understand the marriage of Cooke herself, a woman who remained single for forty-six years? Spofford describes it as a blissful match, but we know that it brought Cooke to financial ruin, forcing her to produce hackwork to keep her household running; and there can be little doubt that anxiety and pinched circumstances helped wear down her health and contributed to the pneumonia that killed her when she was sixty-five.

Yet despite these holes in our knowledge, and they are both large and deep at this point, sufficient information does exist to reconstruct the outline and some details of Rose Terry Cooke's life and career. In addition to Spofford, the excellent dissertation by Jean Downey includes valuable unpublished biographical information, and there are strong statements by the author herself published in Sunday Afternoon in January and August 1879, “A Letter to Mary Ann” and “One More Letter to Mary Ann,” in which she talks candidly, even bitterly in spots, about her experience as a woman writer.

Rose Terry was her parents' first child. Born into comfortable circumstances in Wethersfield, Connecticut, on February 17, 1827, she spent her first three years in the country six miles west of Hartford. Her father, Henry Wadsworth Terry, described by Spofford as a warm-hearted man who loved the outdoors and was a “social favorite,” descended on his mother's side from the same Wadsworth for whom Longfellow was named. What he did, if anything, to supplement the living he had as a member of an affluent middle-class family is uncertain. (One account names landscape gardening but most identify no occupation.) The child's mother, Anne Wright Hurlbut, was the daughter of the first New England shipbuilder to sail around the world, a man said to have lost his life as the result of nursing others during an epidemic. Left an orphan at nine, Cooke's mother matured into a dark, passionate woman who was sensitive and yet undemonstrative on principle, a woman, in the words of Spofford, with a “morbid conscience.”

That Rose Terry adored her mother, at least consciously, seems clear from several anecdotes. In her short essay about being a woman writer, “A Letter to Mary Ann,” Cooke avers: “For myself, I owe whatever power of expression I have to the patient care of my mother, who educated me chiefly herself, and made it a part of my daily drill that I should learn by heart a column of a fine print Walker's dictionary, and then write two sentences containing two of the words properly used. I have now the little book begun when I was six years old, written in a child's round hand, and filled with the day's occurrences. These quaint, priggish paragraphs with the long words underlined, were stiff and constrained enough at first, like the work of any one who handles new tools; but I recognize them now as of the greatest benefit to my future work.” In “One More Letter to Mary Ann,” published later that year, Cooke testifies further to the beneficial effects of her mother's stern discipline:

I never shall forget my own childish tears and sulks over my sewing. My mother was a perfect fairy at her needle, and her rule was relentless; every long stitch was picked out and done over again, and neither tears nor entreaties availed to rid me of my task till it was properly done; every corner of a hem turned by the thread; stitching measured by two threads to a stitch; felling of absolutely regular width, and patching done invisibly; while fine darning was a sort of embroidery. I hated it then, but I have lived to bless that mother's patient persistence; and I am prouder to-day of the six patches in my small girl's school-dress which cannot be seen without searching than of any other handiwork—except perhaps my bread!

These lessons from her mother, good Calvinist schooling in patience and self-discipline, for which the author was consciously grateful as an adult, contain within them significant instruction in the repression of anger and rebellion. The little girl's victory over her own rage gives us some clue into the grown woman's extraordinary sympathy with children, as in “Miss Beulah's Bonnet.”

These childhood episodes also suggest where Cooke experienced at least some of the rage that she showed boiling within many of her women characters, sometimes to the point of explosion, but more often to the point, turned inward, of bitter depression and hopelessness. To be sure, Cooke's mother, teaching her daughter self-control, was simply doing her duty as a responsible Protestant parent in New England in the early nineteenth century, and doing it, from the evidence we have at least, with kindness in addition to sternness and determination. At the same time, however, something wild in both mother and child rebelled against this unbending Puritan ethic, with its calm, relentless emphasis on obedience to authority and suppression of emotion. Asked by Spofford where her mother, who looked Spanish, got her “tropic streak,” Cooke responded with a memory from her childhood considerably different from the dictionary and sewing-lesson anecdotes shared with the readership of Sunday Afternoon.

Cooke told Spofford: “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, a passion for getting out of doors, and in just as little covering as possible. I have known her to go out in her garden, of a summer day, with only a scant skirt over her under-garment, and a hat on her head, and weed, risking interruption. The blood told. She struggled to be rugged and free and out of doors, though her habit was to be proper and shy and meek. It made her interesting, though alarming,” Cooke recalled, “especially when young men used to be about of a summer's afternoon and Alice [Rose Terry's sister] and I spied her, stealing out among the young trees to the carnation bed. Poor little mother! ‘Without were fightings, within were fears,’ for her always.” Cooke ended with the sad admission: “I dreamed, Sunday night, that she came for me to go home. I saw her as plainly as if I had been awake. But when I was awake, she did not come” (Spofford, Book of Friends, 155-56). 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. She understood repression and rebellion, at least in part, because both she and her mother wrestled with them.

A precocious child (she was able to read at three), Rose Terry moved at the age of six with her family, which now included her one-year-old sister Alice, to Hartford, where they took up residence in her paternal grandmother's brick mansion, built for her in 1799 by her father, Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth. This house, with its abundant gardens and huge kitchen fireplace in which the children were permitted to roast apples and melt lumps of sugar, generated some of Rose Terry Cooke's happiest memories, as several stories about Thanksgiving in particular reflect. She spent hours watching and helping her grandmother as the old woman rolled out dough, filled pie shells, and transferred the brimming results to the oven without sloshing so much as a drop of filling onto the carefully fluted crusts. Described as “chill and steel” by her granddaughter, yet also as a necessary balance to her genial husband whose elegant Revolutionary War velvets the little girl liked to finger and dream over in the attic, this grandmother lingered in Rose Terry Cooke's imagination throughout her life as a model of faultless housekeeping and hospitality. She wrote to a friend in distress years later, when she had a home of her own: “‘If you want to run away from every place that is haunted for you by memory or association, come here. Come any time, with or without warning, and feel as if you were coming home. There will at least be love and welcome for you here as long as I have a home’” (Spofford, Book of Friends, 148-49). This concept of “home” as a place that should be safe, warm, and beautiful (but too often was not)—a concept that permeates Cooke's fiction—surely had its roots in the author's fond memories of life in her grandmother's house.

But her childhood also had dark corners. She suffered a severe illness as a child which nearly killed her (leaving her delicate, this sickness had its bright side, ironically, since it prompted her father, like Sarah Orne Jewett's a generation later, to include the little girl on as many outdoor excursions as possible in order to build up her health); and she was afflicted even as a child with severe headaches which would recur throughout her life. Also as a small child she first experienced the intense fear of psychological tyranny which would show up again and again in her adult fiction. She recalled for her friend Harriet Prescott Spofford how various household servants would tell her (at her request, no doubt) ghost and horror stories that so frightened her that, years later, she would creep out of bed in the dead of night to crouch on a top stair where she could see a little light beneath a door or hear some voices that might reassure her.

One teller of such tales stood out, a Greek boy named Athanasius who had escaped from the Turks and subsequently was employed by the little girl's family. One of his duties was to take three-year-old Rose for a walk each day, on which, as Spofford repeats the story, “he would regale her … with the most frightful recitals, threatening that if she ever told her father or mother he would murder her, a possibility which she fully believed of him.” Spofford continues: “So thoroughly had secrecy been burned into her soul by fear that she never told of him till she was a grown woman, and had forgotten every word of his stories; but she never forgot, she has said, her horror when she chanced to meet his fierce black eyes at the table, and, thinking he might fulfill his threat on the supposition that she had betrayed him, would open her lips to cry out, ‘O Athanasius! don't kill me! I haven't told!’ when the thought that such an exclamation was truly betrayal and sudden death checked her.” Spofford quite logically concludes from this information, “It is very possibly something of her own experience of this sort that has made her one of the most eloquent advocates of oppressed children” (Famous Women, 187).

It is also very possible that this anecdote about a man's sadism—conveniently displaced onto a “foreigner”—provides insight into the adult author's repeated dramatization of a man's power to terrify a dependent female into submission and silence. In the fiction, the men who victimize women as did the Athanasius of her childhood are not, except for the rare case such as “The Ring Fetter,” dark, sinister, foreign types. They are upright New England Calvinists. If, as no doubt was the case, a Greek servant did scare the little girl with horror stories and threats of violence lest she tell adults about their secret pastime, one must also wonder what other men—good powerful Calvinist fathers or uncles or grandfathers—were reinforcing that fear in much less exotic, more mundane ways? What other men closer to home, so to speak, were also sitting at the family table, sending lethally silent even if less dramatic threats in the little girl's direction? The experience she recorded in her fiction was the abuse of women by Calvinist New England fathers and husbands, which probably, although she did not choose to share it as she did the safer—because more distanced—Athanasius story, had its basis in fact as well.

Rose Terry completed her formal schooling at the Hartford Female Seminary, the respected women's institution founded by Catharine Beecher in the 1820s and attended by, among others, young Harriet Beecher. According to Cooke's obituary in the New York Times (July 19, 1892) she hurried her education, graduating at sixteen, because her father had suffered some financial reversals and it was necessary for her to begin earning her own living. (The obituary also volunteers, with how much accuracy it is hard to say, that the girl's father “held very frigid ideas in reference to her mingling in the society of young people, and the young woman was taught utterly to discourage the society and attentions of young men. The restrictions thus laid upon her life and development caused her to become diffident in society and almost prudish in manner, and she found her relief and companionship in books and in her own imagination.”) At the same time that her formal schooling came to an end, Rose Terry officially joined the Congregational Church, and she remained an orthodox and serious Christian throughout her life. Although she often criticized Calvinism in her work, her critique was offered from inside, as it were, rather than outside the Christian fold. She taught in Hartford for a while after graduation and then decided to take a post in a Presbyterian church school in Burlington, New Jersey. After four years, during which time she became the governess for the clergyman's family, she returned to Hartford to be with her own family again.

Rose Terry's return to Hartford in 1847 began a period of combined domestic responsibilities and literary productivity which would last in one form or another until her death in the early 1890s. It was a point of pride with her that she supported herself all her life, a decision motivated by necessity but also by principle, as she makes clear in “A Letter to Mary Ann”: “I have taken care of myself ever since I left school, and hope to do so as long as I live.” Fulfilling this hope would not always be easy.

Rose Terry Cooke's first love as a writer was poetry, the most prestigious literary form of her era, and it was as a writer of verse that she hoped to make her way in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Although she never had major success as a poet (her verse for the most part is undistinguished), she did publish her first poems in the New York Tribune, under the editorship of Charles Dana at the time (it speaks to her emotional investment in the enterprise that she chose her mother's initials—A. W. H.—as her pseudonym for these poems). She wrote verse for many years, collecting her poems in two volumes, the first published in 1861, the second in 1888. Some poems such as “The Two Villages” enjoyed wide circulation and remain effective today, and she did achieve recognition for her poetry, being honored for example by an invitation to read her verse at the Commencement Exercises of Smith College in 1881.

But it was as a fiction writer that Rose Terry Cooke was truly gifted and would manage, although sometimes just barely, to earn her own living. To the best of our present knowledge, she published her first story in Putnam's Magazine in 1855 (the story, which is about Mormons, forecasts later themes in its attack on husbands' unlimited power within marriage) and went on to build in the 1850s a solid magazine publishing record. Yet her situation was always precarious. She relates in “A Letter to Mary Ann”: “If a man has a reputation as a writer, it does him great service; there are a few men in America who might write the wildest nonsense, and in their script and under their name no editor would dare to refuse it; but it is not so with women.” She then tells how one of her best stories met with repeated refusals, which climaxed in an “elaborately polite letter” from one of the magazines “saying that the canons of taste forbade the editor to accept a story so sad in its motive; that it was a duty to brighten life for the public, not darken it with melancholy detail; so with much regret, etc., etc., it was returned.” Yet, she continues, “in the next issue of that magazine there was a ghastly story by Turgenieff, beside which my simple detail of a common New England family was really hilarious; and also a dreary story of confused woe and despair from a popular American (male) author!” Cooke draws a resigned moral—“this is the sort of thing that befalls a woman who writes, and all she can do is to accept the situation”—which attempts but fails to disguise the author's indignation at the inequity she was forced to live with. Likewise the double standard in pay angered Cooke, though, again and characteristically, her advice in “A Letter to Mary Ann” was to live with it: “I only say that as a rule men are paid more than women. … It is the thing that is, and being a woman you will have to submit to it; therefore have the strength to do so quietly, for there is no help for you.” When it came to prudery, however, she was merely amused: “I have had stories returned, one because there was a profane expression put into the mouth of a character, who was represented as surprised into that one oath and deeply penitent for it; one in which I had written ‘stomach-ache,’ came back marked, ‘Say “a pain”’; and also ‘for “big” say “large””’ (“A Letter to Mary Ann”). Disgusted rather than upset, Cooke, who was conventional when it came to matters of taste or even most moral issues, could only laugh at such squeamishness.

She could not laugh, however, at the economic worries that frequently pressed upon her. (Her impersonators' fantasies about her wealth must have seemed pitiful to her.) The habit of first-class magazines' not paying promptly for stories they accepted compelled her, to her regret, to seek publication in magazines that did not demand—indeed, did not desire—the sophistication that the Atlantic or Harper's assumed its audience capable of. It is indisputable that Cooke's published work is highly uneven; much of what she wrote is not good at all. Yet this occurred in part at least because she was forced to write much of the time under acute financial pressure.

That pressure grew worse when, on April 16, 1873, Rose Terry married Rollin H. Cooke, a widower sixteen years her junior. He was a bank clerk in Winsted, Connecticut, as well as an aspiring author of historical and genealogical works (some of which he published). In A Little Book of Friends Spofford explains that Rose Terry and Rollin Cooke met when both boarded in the same house in Connecticut, and that “his circumstances so excited her pity, that pity which is akin to love, that finally she yielded to his persuasion and became his wife” (146). Spofford describes Rollin Cooke as “a very attractive and lovable man, witty himself and the cause of wit in others, always interesting and always good-natured,” and she states that “their relation was quite perfect.” Full of admiration for her work and evidently unstinting in his emotional support, Rollin Cooke seems to have been devoted to his wife, and the union probably brought Rose Terry Cooke a great deal of happiness.

It also brought her desperate economic worries. Rollin Cooke was not a steady provider and soon after the marriage he and his father managed to run through all of Rose Terry Cooke's savings, which meant that she had to make a completely new start financially at a time in life when she might well have expected to be economically secure, even if not wealthy. A proud woman, she had to bring herself to wrangle about payments and word limits even more than usual. A year before her death she wrote to the editor of the Atlantic, Horace E. Scudder: “One reason why I have not written for the Atlantic has been their long delay in printing. In writing as I have from daily necessity you will understand that I had to write for papers and magazines that paid on acceptance. But I have always wanted to go back to the Atlantic for I was one of the two women who wrote for its first number and all my early successes were achieved in its columns. It is an old friend. So if you think you can print my story by June, I will not put a price on it, but will wait and be paid per page” (Downey, “Atlantic Friends,” 133). This letter recalling her distinguished beginning with the magazine, such a far cry from present anxieties about words per page and payment timetables, could not have been easy to write, although it may be that the timely publication of the story in question, “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse” (the letter was written in February and the story did appear in the June issue), made this particular haggle less depressing than some.

On July 18, 1892, Rose Terry Cooke died at home. She was by the time of her death a writer highly regarded by such old friends and admirers as Harriet Prescott Spofford and William Dean Howells, but rather rapidly forgotten by a new generation of readers and critics increasingly eager to dissociate themselves from all but a very few of their nineteenth-century forebears, especially if they were female.

Rose Terry Cooke exactly represents one type of nineteenth-century American woman writer that most twentieth-century literary criticism and history have been eager to dismiss as unimportant. She did not produce “a” great work. She left behind no solitary, monumental masterpiece. Instead, she left many small pieces and wrote out of a separate and predominantly female tradition, which coexisted with but remained in important ways largely independent of the masculine gospel of Great Works. Rose Terry Cooke's forte was the regional sketch, a form, as Marjorie Pryse has persuasively argued, not only pioneered by women but also developed and manipulated by them into what may very well be one of the few existing distinctly female genres.² The sketch does not seek to control its subject as do novels, epic poems, or traditional dramatic scripts. It does not aspire to omnipotence. It is, instead, admittedly marginal, as are women in patriarchally structured society.

The sketch concentrates on depicting a narrowly limited portion of life geographically and sociologically, and its intent, in addition to telling a story (if that function is present, which is not always the case), is to render the social and psychological life of the region as faithfully as possible. To be sure, the sketch—short, suggestive rather than definitive—may become, like sections of a quilt (also a women's art form), part of some larger design that does approach comprehensiveness, as in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), for example, or, likewise deriving from the work of nineteenth-century women, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). But even when that expansion happens, the aesthetic is one of accretion—aggregation—rather than of accelerating linear plot development.

Seen in this light, the tradition of the sketch, or as much twentieth-century literary criticism and history has belittlingly labeled it, the “local color tradition,” has interesting connections with contemporary theories about the shape and nature of modern western female consciousness. As Nancy Chodorow explains in The Reproduction of Mothering and Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice, women are reared in modern American culture (by modern I mean the Victorian era through the present) to value relationships over success-oriented individual goals and to place far more importance on process and context than do men in the culture, from whom end results and decontextualized abstract reasoning and judgments are expected. Perhaps this helps explain why the regional sketch developed as a literary form particularly hospitable to women, especially throughout the last century when a number of women writers were drawn to the form. It could be that the sketch had pragmatic advantages. We might theorize that nineteenth-century women, expected to run households and in many cases to raise children while they wrote, could fit the writing of short fictions into demanding domestic schedules with a little more ease than novel writing. However, the abundance of novels published by women in the last century suggests that this practical consideration may be more imaginary than real. A more likely explanation for women's affinity for and excellence with the sketch and short story, it seems to me, is the psychological one. The form permits women to offer ungrandiose, concrete art, shaped, more often than not, by the rhythms of domestic and feminine experience, which is cyclical, repetitive, and often inconclusive.

Individuals' relatedness to their specific environment rather than any abstract concept about universal human nature or experience lies at the heart of the regional sketch, which assumes it can know well only its own admittedly narrow field. Claims to vast masterful brilliance—the kind of overarching intellectual control aspired to by a Melville or Joyce, for example—are emphatically not part of the subtext of the sketch. To the contrary, it is the finiteness, the limitedness of the authorial project, brilliant in its detailed concrete accuracy perhaps, but lacking in any pretension to impressive scope, that makes the sketch appealing—as well perhaps as “feminine.” A tiny piece of life is all, even if we are very lucky, that we can see clearly. True, in the pebble may be the boulder: that the author and reader can surmise. But what we are shown is the pebble.

Within this form, several thematic groupings emerge from Cooke's works, collected and uncollected.

Her love stories are for the most part more sentimental than we like today. An exception is “Amandar” (Harper's, 1880; reissued in Somebody's Neighbors), which looks at love between a father and son and dramatizes the feelings of a man who so loved his wife who died in childbirth that he named their son for her, to the boy's predictable embarrassment. Also successful because it avoids oversweetness is “Uncle Josh” (Putnam's, 1857; reissued in Somebody's Neighbors), a funny story about a sailor whose inveterate cursing is cured not by his gentle first wife, whom he adores, but by his brusque second who refuses to police his language: she will not allow her self to be made his “pack mule to heaven.” One of Cooke's best love stories, “Miss Lucinda,” is also one of her least conventional, showing the origins of love in a pigsty and treating with dignity the first love of an eccentric older woman.

More distinctive than the love stories, however (or the pious religious sketches collected in Root-Bound, none of which is included here because they are very formulaic and pat), are Cooke's biting—sometimes grimly humorous, sometimes simply grim—tales about Calvinism, about domestic violence in American society, and about life as a single woman in rural, white, middle-class New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Cooke had mixed feelings about Calvinism. In a few stories, such as “Some Account of Thomas Tucker,” she expresses admiration for the strength of character fostered by the religion. Likewise, “The Deacon's Week” (Putnam's, 1887; reissued in The Sphinx's Children), one of Cooke's most popular stories in the nineteenth century, shows an uncompromising yet constructive Calvinism at work in a community; the parson leads his flock through a series of reforms in which they focus their prayers and willpower on a different topic each week, such as temperance, parenting, and so forth. But in most cases Cooke brings a highly critical rather than an admiring perspective to Calvinism. In “Alcedama Sparks; Or, Old and New” (Harper's, 1859; reissued in The Sphinx's Children) she considers the conflict over religion between a father and son, the father professing a hardline Calvinism while the son espouses a new, more tolerant and compassionate Christianity. Nursed back to health by this gentle son, the father finally concedes that the new faith may be an improvement. In contrast to this reconciliation between parent and child, the communion achieved by a mother and daughter in “Too Late,” also a story about Calvinism's grip on the New England family, is bitter. Mother and daughter come together, but, true to Cooke's title, it is otherwise too late for the mother to find happiness or peace of mind in this life. The faith of her father has blighted her life irremediably.

Yet to single out a category of fictions about Calvinism may be misleading, for it could be argued that Calvinism so pervades the stories and sketches, coloring the landscape and shaping the characters' lives, that it does not really function as a discrete topic in Cooke. Rather, it reinforces in negative ways the patriarchal authority that constricts the lives of almost all of the women and children, and some of the men as well, in Cooke's fictive New England. Not all men in Cooke's fiction are tyrants. Some are kind, loving husbands, brothers, fathers, or friends. But many—and many of the most powerfully drawn—are neither kind nor loving. They are arrogant, cruel, despotic. Hardened by their constant struggle with an ungiving earth and fortified in that struggle by a religion forged out of fear and cast in an ironclad intellectuality, Cooke's men—fathers, deacons, husbands—brutalize their wives and daughters. Some of these women successfully rebel, as in “Grit” (Harper's, 1877; reissued in Huckleberries) or “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” but others are crushed, as Cooke also shows in “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” as well as in “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse” (Atlantic, 1891; reissued in Huckleberries) or “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience.”

Cooke's analysis of this patriarchal landscape receives blunt expression in her uncollected sketch “The West Shetucket Railway,” published in the Independent in 1872, just about midway through her publishing career (and, interestingly, the year before her marriage). Surveying rural New England, she thinks about “life in lonely farms among its wild mountains, or on the bare, desolate hills that roll their sullen brown summits mile on mile through the lower tracts of this region” and states:

There is nothing more painful than the prevalence of crime and disease in these isolated homes. Born to an inheritance of hard labor, labor necessary to mere life; fighting with that most valorous instinct of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate not only rigorous but fatally changeful, a soil bitter and barren enough to need that gold should be sewn before more than copper can be harvested, without any excitement to stir the half torpid brain, without any pleasure, the New England farmer becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts akin to the beasts that perish—hard, cruel, sensual, vindictive. An habitual church-goer, perhaps; but none the less thoroughly irreligious. All the keener sensitiveness of his organization blunted by overwork and underfeeding till the finer emotions of his soul dwindle and perish for want of means of expression, he revenges himself on his condition in the natural way. And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women, whose more delicate nature is proportionately more excitable, whose hearts bleed silently to the very last drop before their lips find utterance,—when you bring to bear on these poor weak souls, made for love and gentleness and bright outlooks from the daily dulness of work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish tyranny of husbands to whom they are tied beyond escape, what wonder is it that a third of all the female lunatics in our asylums are farmers' wives, and that domestic tragedies, even beyond the scope of a sensitive novel, occur daily in these lonely houses, far beyond human help or hope?

The women who escape this tyranny are the occasional confrontive wife such as Melinda in “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” or simply the lucky one, for example the heroine of “Dely's Cow,”or, as is most frequently the case, single women who have the good judgment to avoid marriage in the first place, such as Aunts Huldah and Hannah in “Freedom Wheeler.” These two women prize their independence, and because they are financially self-sufficient they can, as Huldah illustrates, contradict masculine authority from a position of security (something a dependent wife or daughter cannot do).

But Huldah is the exception—as her timid sister Hannah freely owns. Most single women in Cooke's fictive world are either cowed by masculine authority or demoralized by the stigma against old maids, a bigotry that produces one of the most familiar patterns in Cooke, the story which traces the reckless decision of a spinster or widow, often someone with a comfortable home and respected social position in the community, to marry. “Odd Miss Todd” (Harper's, 1882; reissued in Huckleberries), “How Celia Changed Her Mind,” and “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience” all work variations on the theme of a misguided character's dissatisfaction with her life as a single woman, as does “Polly Mariner, Tailoress” (Galaxy, 1870; reissued in Somebody's Neighbors), although in that particular story Cooke finds the subject poignant rather than tragic. The parson's wife in “How Celia Changed Her Mind,” a woman who knows from personal experience that “even married life had its own loneliness” and therefore is “inclined to agree with St. Paul, that the woman who did not marry ‘doeth better,’” tries to influence Celia: “‘Many, indeed, most of my best friends are maiden ladies, and I respect and love them just as much as if they were married women.’” But unfortunately it is not the respect and love of other women that the disgruntled spinster in Cooke's story wants. As Cooke ruefully observes in this story: “It may be said of men, as of elephants, that it is lucky they do not know their own power; for how many more women would become their worshipers and slaves than are so to-day if they knew the abject gratitude the average woman feels for the least attention, the smallest kindness, the faintest expression of affection or good will. We are all, like the Syrophenician woman, glad and ready to eat of the crumbs which fall from the children's table, so great is our faith—in men.”

As this observation suggests, one disturbing theme in Cooke is the extent to which women are not merely victims, but complicit or willing victims in their oppression. To be sure, they comply because they have been shaped by the culture. Cooke does not suggest that women are naturally passive or abject, much less masochistic. The conditions of most women's lives—exhausting physical labor, repeated childbearing, endless indoctrination in the superiority of male intellect and spiritual authority—conspire to beat them down. Women reflect even in their most private moments, as a frightening tale like “Too Late” shows, attitudes they have been taught. But that is not the whole story. Cooke also believes that women at some level contribute to their own victimization when they unthinkingly participate in the type of psychological dependence on men which she criticizes in the statement quoted above and in the entire story “How Celia Changed Her Mind.” Change would have to begin not simply in the attitudes of men, but of women as well.

The stories reprinted here are intended to represent Cooke's best work and to show some of her range and development over time. The first three are early stories, appearing, respectively, in the Atlantic in January 1858, Harper's in July of that same year, and the Atlantic in August 1859. Never anthologized by Cooke, they are far more Romantic—allegorical, even Gothic—than her better-known work. They also are three of her most interesting stories. Coming out of the same mid-century fascination with evil and darkness which produced Poe, Melville, Spofford, and Stowe, they are concerned, among other things, with death and the boundaries of human consciousness; with the invention of a creation myth that accounts anew not only for good and evil but also for the creation of earthly creators themselves, artists; and with the frightening power of human passion, including same-sex attachments as opposed to heterosexual bonds.

“Maya, the Princess” has no realistic level. It is a totally symbolic story: a parable about the woman artist which can also be read as a female creation myth. Cooke immerses us in an imaginary matriarchal realm (the father/king in this tale is a shadowy figure off at war at every crucial point in the development of his daughter, Maya: women, queens and fairies, exercise power in the mythic land of Maya's birthplace). The story of Maya's endowment with the Spark, symbol of wisdom, suffering, and creativity, deliberately echoes and rewrites Genesis (as well as Hawthorne). In place of Satan, the jealous spirit Anima stretches out “her wand, a snake of black diamonds, with a blood-red head,” and touches the child Maya's eyes so that “from the serpent's rapid tongue a spark of fire darted into either eye,” blessing/cursing the girl-child with vision not available to others in the realm.

As a parable of the Fall, “Maya, the Princess” tells the story of Everywoman, doomed to a life of suffering because she mistakenly places her faith in a man. As the woman artist's story, Maya's “Spark” becomes a curse segregating her from life—although still the Spark is a gift, though terrible. Unlike her innocent sisters, Maya comes to know suffering and pain and in the end experiences the lot of the beggar woman. She sees life from the bottom. Rich in symbols, this allegory about women and art can be read as creation myth or as veiled autobiography. In either case, it records the nineteenth-century woman artist's despair that she may never be able to use the magnificent yet frightening vision with which she has been endowed. It records her grief over being rendered “songless.”

If “Maya” is a bitter parable, not unlike “The Valley of Childish Things” (1896) published by Edith Wharton almost half a century later, it is also witty and, oddly enough, darkly optimistic. In the imagined realm of female flesh and spirit from which Maya springs (again, the paternal presence is virtually nonexistent) there is a kind of empowering vision that anticipates Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). Cooke's creation of a powerful realm of mythic mothers, wicked as well as good (here she differs from Gilman), implies an alternative and potentially invigorating psychic heritage for women, one in which our imagined past, and therefore perhaps our future as well, might exist independent of the control of patriarchs.

In the tradition of Spofford's “The Amber Gods” (1860) as well as Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), “My Visitation” is a tale told by a first-person disturbed narrator, who announces that she will not be able to give us a cool, neatly arranged narrative but, instead, the agonized, admittedly emotional outpourings of her heart. An avid reader of the Brontës, this woman offers us a love story as Gothic as any the Brontës wrote—a tale of wild, dangerous passion that defies the grave—with the difference here that the passion involved is, explicitly rather than implicitly, the love of a woman for another woman. The issue the narrator struggles with is her disinterest in, her relative lack of attraction to, heterosexuality. The narrator is never “without constant yearnings for Eleanor,” whom she describes as “the one present and all-absorbing passion of my soul.” She says: “I discovered in myself that I never could have loved any man as I did her,” and realizes that “I had but the lesser part of a heart to give any man. I loved a woman too well to love or to marry.” “My Visitation” charts the painful journey this woman is expected to make away from this passionate same-sex attachment to union with a man; and the fact that Cooke dramatizes that journey as a horror story—a kind of living nightmare that tips the narrator into madness—reveals both how dangerous the enforced journey into heterosexuality is and, in many cases, how damaging.

In part Cooke raises a sociological issue. Her narrator admits: “I shuddered at the possibility of loving a man so utterly, and then placing myself at his mercy for life.” Given men's power over women in patriarchal culture, a power Cooke shows herself well aware of in story after story, love for a man can mean consigning oneself to a life of abuse and even torture from which escape, in an era before divorce, was impossible. The narrator's fear of heterosexuality is not prudish (as her feelings for Eleanor show, she is obviously able to own and express her passions) but realistic. Passionate dependence on a man, given the social structure, is dangerous.

Yet the struggle in “My Visitation” runs deeper than a critique of marriage in patriarchal society. In order to be “sane” and “normal” in her society, the narrator must rip herself away from the passionate attachment she feels for another woman. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explains in her study of middle-class white women's friendships in the nineteenth century, most women lived in a world sharply divided into separate masculine and feminine spheres—the former public, rational, and competitive in nature, the latter private, emotional, and relational. Therefore for many women emotional and even physical satisfaction came from relationships not with men but with other women: sisters, mothers, and especially friends. Defined as asexual creatures by their culture, respectable women could show their love for one another openly in speech, embraces, and letters, and, Smith-Rosenberg argues, they could continue their passionate attachments even after marriage, practicing obedience and conjugal compliance in their relations with their husbands, but reserving their intense affection and genuine love for other women. Cooke's story, while demonstrating the gulf between a nineteenth-century woman's feelings for men and her feelings for another woman, contradicts the principal argument of Smith-Rosenberg's essay: that the two kinds of feelings could coexist in adult female life. Cooke's heroine must renounce her feelings for Eleanor; she must come to see her beloved as a monster and her own passionate love for her as deranged. Anticipating Sarah Orne Jewett's “A White Heron” (1886), another story about enforced passage into heterosexuality, Cooke's horror story records the psychic pain—the descent into madness—that the injunction to love men has caused many women.

Stylistically, “The Ring Fetter” represents a bridge between Cooke's Romantic fiction and the more realistic stories and sketches that would typify her work throughout the rest of her career. Like “Maya, the Princess” and “My Visitation,” its atmosphere is exotic, even Gothic: in this story a woman is literally the prisoner of a demonic villain, a murderer, who chains her to him in marriage. The settings are morbid; the characters, including an ancient black couple as hopelessly in the husband's thrall as the wife he abuses and tortures, are exaggerated. At the same time, this tale mounts the realistic criticism of marriage that Cooke would go on to offer repeatedly in her subsequent fiction: her horror at the unlimited power of husbands over wives within marriage. She says of her heroine married to a drunkard and criminal (the woman's own mother was so isolated as a wife that it maddened and finally killed her): “She could not leave him; she was utterly in his power; she was his,—like his boots, his gun, his dog; and till he should tire of her and fling her into some lonely chamber to waste and die, she was bound to serve him; he was safe.” The sadistic conclusion of this fiction about the powerlessness of wives perfectly meshes the Romanticism and the realism that coexist throughout the narrative.

The next three stories, “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” and “How Celia Changed Her Mind” are fully accomplished realistic pieces on the subjects of marriage and of Calvinist repression and rigidity.

“Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” brilliantly fuses several of Cooke's themes: the strength and grit of old women who remain single, the tyranny of Calvinist husbands, the drudgery and victimization of women in marriage, and the value of female rebellion. The piece is grimly funny, even macabre. Freedom Wheeler determines to have a son named after him, despite obvious providential signs to the contrary; and in the course of charting his battle against nature, God, the church, and—finally and most formidable—a woman not about to be intimidated by his masculine arrogance, Cooke converts her own rage into revenge. She brings Freedom Wheeler through a devastating series of losses to a confrontation with his own character which is profoundly humbling and life altering. The story, considered one of Cooke's best, represents an excellent introduction to its author's bedrock quarrel with patriarchal authority.

Equally typical is “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” a story about mother-daughter loss, the abuse of women possible within patriarchal marriage, and the inability of men to judge women's lives. This sketch shows the terrible mistake a single woman makes when she decides to marry because she is lonely and feels unappreciated. When the Widow Gold marries Deacon Flint, thus becoming Mrs. Flint (the change in her name mirrors her fate), she signs her own death warrant. The deacon—model churchman and upstanding citizen—works his wife to exhaustion, starves her, refuses to let her see other people, deprives her of sufficient clothing in the winter, and then ignores her debilitation and deterioration. All of this he does in the name of Christian duty and economy; and as Cooke explains in the story, this man is not a figment of her imagination: “If this story were not absolutely true,” she declares, “I should scarce dare to invent such a character as Deacon Flint.” When his wife leaves this man, partly through the encouragement of a young woman who is horrified by his cruelty and determined that the old woman not submit to it any longer, the church deacons censure her for her disobedience, despite the protests, it is important to say, of a renegade parson who sides with the woman. This bitter story, especially in its closing fury—the young woman Mabel confronts Deacon Flint: “‘Are you proper pleased now?’ she said in a low voice of concentred contempt and rage. … ‘You've killed her as good as if you took an axe to her’”—passionately illustrates Cooke's outrage at the victimization of women by tyrannical husbands.

Reiterating the central issue of “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” “How Celia Changed Her Mind” records the fate of a spinster who marries late in life because she feels that “‘a woman that's married is somebody; she's got a place in the world … but … you might as well be a dog as an old maid.’” The marriage she makes, like the wretched lovematch that inspires the tale's subplot, is typical (“It was no worse with Celia than with most of her sex in Bassett”) and hellish:

Admitted into the freemasonry of married women, she discovered how few among them were more than household drudges, the servants of their families, worked to the verge of exhaustion, and neither thanked nor rewarded for their pains. She saw here a woman whose children were careless of, and ungrateful to her, and her husband coldly indifferent; there was one on whom the man she had married wreaked all his fiendish temper in daily small injuries, little vexatious acts, petty tyrannies, a “street-angel, house-devil” of a man, of all sorts the most hateful. There were many whose lives had no other outlook than hard work until the end should come, who rose up to labor and lay down in sleepless exhaustion, and some whose days were a constant terror to them from the intemperate brutes to whom they had intrusted their happiness, and indeed their whole existence.

Celia, whose marriage is as bad as any of these, is very nearly broken by her husband's mean-spirited miserliness. Yet, mercifully, she is not. In contrast to “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience,” in this story it is the husband who dies, and his widow meets the world with defiance. She refuses to wear mourning and replies to anyone who compliments her on her inheritance, “‘I earned it.’” This sketch tells of tragedy but ends in triumph. Celia, surrounding herself with old maids, proudly presides over an all-female Thanksgiving dinner at which she vows: “‘Every year, so long as I live, I'm going to keep an old maids' Thanksgivin' for a kind of a burnt-offering, sech as the Bible tells about, for I've changed my mind clear down to the bottom.’” And then, this widow, who was nearly starved to death by her husband, says to the hungry women surrounding her: “‘let's go to work at the victuals.’”

Cooke did not always write gloomy or tragic fiction, as the next three stories—“Miss Lucinda,” “Dely's Cow,” and “Miss Beulah's Bonnet”—attest. She could be playful; she could be poignant; she could be raucously funny.

“Miss Lucinda” opens with a consciously literary declaration about realism. “Forgive me once more, patient reader,” Cooke announces, “if I offer to you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman who could not be a heroine.” This nonheroine is a jolly, round-cheeked older woman who has her world well ordered. Her pets, flowers, lovely manners, and refined table give her great pleasure and fulfillment, persuading her that she needs nothing else. Then there appears a pig and on its heels a fastidious French dancing master to complicate her life. First her world turns slapstick and then into a kind of farce, with Miss Lucinda and the French dancing master pirouetting in the pigsty and the old maid appearing at dance class decked out in scarlet ribbons and “clouds of lace.” The happy ending of this story, which plays with the Romantic fantasy of a wounded man's being tamed by the love of a woman (a familiar pattern in the Brontës, for example), shows the positive side of Cooke's vision. In this sweet, funny story, which incidentally reverses the Circe myth (here a man replaces a pig rather than the other way around), Cooke holds up two misfits, two “crazies”—an independent Eve in her unspoiled Garden and a down-at-the-heels Frenchman—as two of the healthiest, most likable characters in her fiction. Neither is a Calvinist; neither is central or “important” in New England society. Indeed, both are marginal, peculiar. Love between a man and a woman is possible in Cooke's world, this story suggests, but it thrives outside conventional patriarchal structures.

“Dely's Cow” is a delicate sketch. It shows us the loneliness and hardness of rural New England life for a young wife during wartime, yet it is not anger or social criticism but a gentle sympathy that Cooke seems to express here. Dely's husband, a good person, is a loyal patriot, and when he joins the army she is left on their farm miles away from any adult human contact. During her long months of isolation, with only her baby to keep her company, she finds consolation and friendship in the cow she daily grooms and milks. Dely's cow—sweet, sad, milky, given a name—represents a major presence, literal and symbolic, in this story about a young woman's isolation and deprivation. The two females, one human, the other bovine, form a nonverbal community that sees the young mother through her long period of killing solitude.

“Miss Beulah's Bonnet,” a comical sketch, makes a serious point about cruelty to children and about the deep chasm between masculine and feminine culture in the white, rural, New England landscape surveyed by Cooke. When her prized (and ludicrously old-fashioned) Leghorn bonnet disappears, it does not occur to Beulah Larkin—a stereotypically “tall, gaunt, hard-featured, and good” old woman who has remained single and highly respected all her life—that it might be connected to her harsh treatment of one of her wards, a healthily high-spirited little boy whose sister the old maid pets but whose own antics and bids for attention she crushes. Similarly, when Miss Beulah fails to appear in church and the deacons, with dour ceremony and high self-importance, come to interrogate their backslid sister, they fail to see or properly appreciate the connection between the good woman's absence and her hatlessness. While unimportant to men, the possession of a proper church hat is a serious matter in female culture. It is not a question of fashion but of self-dignity. A seasonally inappropriate or hopelessly ragged bonnet makes a woman look as foolish in church as would a pair of knickers on a grown man; it is a matter of being able to present oneself as a serious, adult member of the community who understands that honoring God begins in self-respect and the observance of certain rules of decorum. None of this is understood by the jury of patriarchs who come to visit their judgment on—to their way of thinking—the unaccountably balky, even prideful, old maid. Much like Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) early in this century, Cooke's story criticizes the assumption of men that their rules and values are the only ones: the sketch affirms the integrity and dignity of women's culture and community in the face of male ignorance and even contempt. (Significantly, women band together to replace Miss Beulah's bonnet.) An amusing story about the differences between the male and female spheres, “Miss Beulah's Bonnet” forces both Miss Beulah and the church fathers to face the blindness that is produced by their radically segregated worlds.

The last two pieces in this volume return to tragedy, marriage, and the subject of Calvinism.

“Too Late”—quite possibly the best story Cook ever wrote—shows the tragic effect on a woman of the severe Calvinist upbringing that taught her to hate her own body and to scorn all pleasure and emotion in this life. Taking as her model her harsh Calvinist father, for whom existence “was a heavy and dreadful responsibility … a perpetual fleeing from the wrath to come,” Hannah Blair impulsively and then methodically crushes her own spirit, taking out her pain on her own daughter, whose love she rejects and whose body, always with good Calvinist cause, she beats. As a mother-daughter story, this sketch in culturally produced self-mutilation, which spills over into child abuse, examines the suffering that women inflict on themselves and each other, including their daughters, when they buy into life-denying patriarchal values. Although the sketch finally offers a modicum of hope in its portrait of the last relationship we see in the story, it is uncompromising in its critique of Calvinism's destructive legacy for women.

“Some Account of Thomas Tucker,” in contrast, ponders the inspiring side of Calvinism, its “ghastly honesty.” The sketch traces the career of a repressed but relentlessly dutiful son of Puritanism whose father was cheerless and orthodox and whose mother was spiritless and drab. Parson Tucker constantly confronts his flock with their hypocrisy: he accosts the bride at the altar, commanding her to look into her heart and motives; he preaches the blessing of infant mortality at the annual baptismal service. This “aggressive honesty” isolates and exposes him. He cannot even hide from his own fear of death. Yet this honesty is strangely, bitterly, admirable. His refusal to compromise the truth as he sees it is both the blight on his life and the beauty of it in this highly critical and yet compassionate reflection on Calvinism.

Likewise the refusal of Rose Terry Cooke to compromise the truth as she saw it accounts for much of the energy—the force—of her best fiction. Cooke had a superb ear for dialect and dialogue. The speech of her characters in the realistic fiction rings true to life; we can believe that actual people are talking. She also had an eye for detail, as any regionalist must, and a keen fix on significant character types: the prophetic Native American, Moll Thunder, who appears in several of the sketches; the starchy Aunts Huldah and Hannah of “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence”; the series of cruel patriarchs who dominate Cooke's fictive New England landscape. In addition Cooke's dramatic sense is sharp. Often she opens a sketch with dialogue, drawing the reader in swiftly. In her best work she is skillful at looping exposition and history in after she has begun, and frequently her conclusions introduce the perfect last stroke that pulls the whole composition into brilliant focus. As a stylist, Cooke is impressive.

But finally it is for her honesty, I think, that Rose Terry Cooke stands out: her fierce commitment to telling the truth as she saw it. Harriet Prescott Spofford observed of her friend, “Possibly she would be as good a hater as lover should occasion rise, for indifference is impossible to her, and all her emotions are strong ones” (Famous Women, 191). Spofford's “possibly” here is decorative—a mere piece of tact. Clearly Rose Terry Cooke was as good a hater as she was a lover, and the strength of those emotions—Cooke's refusal to remain indifferent—is what gives her best work its aggressive honesty, even its “ghastly honesty,” which speaks across the century that separates her life from ours.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all biographical information in this introduction comes from Harriet Prescott Spofford's two works on Rose Terry Cooke and from Jean Downey, “A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke.”

2. Marjorie Pryse is presently writing a major study of nineteenth-century American regionalism as a women's form.

Selected Bibliography

Works by Rose Terry Cooke

Happy Dodd. Boston: Ticknor, 1887.

“A Hard Lesson.” The Continent 5 (June 1884): 682-88.

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

“A Letter to Mary Ann.” Sunday Afternoon 3 (Jan. 1879): 79-83.

“Maya, the Princess.” Atlantic Monthly 1 (Jan. 1858): 263-70.

“My Visitation.” Harper's 17 (July 1858): 232-39.

“One More Letter to Mary Ann.” Sunday Afternoon 3 (Aug. 1879): 752-55.

Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861.

Poems. New York: Gottsberger, 1888.

“The Ring Fetter.” Atlantic Monthly 4 (Aug. 1859): 154-70.

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

Somebody's Neighbors. Boston: Osgood, 1881.

The Sphinx's Children and Other People's. Boston: Ticknor, 1886.

Steadfast, the Story of A Saint and A Sinner. Boston: Ticknor, 1889.

Sources and Further Readings

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. 68-81.

Downey, Jean. “Atlantic Friends: Howells and Cooke.” American Notes and Queries 1 (May 1963): 132-33.

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

———. “Rose Terry Cooke: A Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibliography 21 (May-Aug. 1955): 159-63; (Sept.-Dec. 1955): 191-92.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.

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

Howells, William Dean. W. D. Howells as Critic. Ed. Edwin H. Cady. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

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

Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. 139-42.

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

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-28.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. A Little Book of Friends. Boston: Little, Brown, 1916. 143-56.

———. “Rose Terry Cooke.” Our Famous Women, An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps et al. Hartford: A. D. Worthington, 1884. 174-206.

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

Westbrook, Perry D. Acres of Flint: Sarah Orne Jewett and Her Contemporaries. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1951; rev. ed. 1981. 78-85.