SOURCE: Toth, Susan Allen. “Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892).” American Literary Realism 1870-1910 4, no. 2, (spring 1971): 170-76.

[In the following essay, Toth provides an overview of scholarship on Rose Terry Cooke.]

I. HISTORY OF CRITICISM

Although her romantic poetry, religious tracts, and sentimental love stories may have been justly forgotten, Rose Terry Cooke's New England local-color tales have never won deserved recognition, either in proportion to their wide publication or to their varying literary merit. James Russell Lowell praised her early collection of poems in 1861, but he spoke more enthusiastically of her “as a writer of picturesque and vigorous prose, as one of the most successful sketchers of New England character, abounding in humor and pathos” (Atlantic, 7 [Mar 1861], 382). Since Cooke was unable to realize enough profit by her poetry, she turned increasingly to fiction, publishing short stories and sketches in leading magazines like Putnam's, Galaxy, Harper's, and Atlantic for more than thirty years. Trying to please changing audiences, she produced both standard romantic melodramas and New England stories, the latter full of closely observed detail, intense character analysis, sympathetic humor, and realistic backgrounds. Although the best of these stories, collected in Somebody's Neighbors (Boston: Osgood, 1881), The Sphinx's Children (Boston: Ticknor, 1886) and Huckleberries Gathered From New England Hills (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), helped to advance the cause of realism and bring local color into popular vogue, they have never received the kind of attention accorded to the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, or Alice Brown.

The Atlantic eventually published long critical studies of Jewett, Freeman, and Brown, all by Charles M. Thompson, but the editors after Lowell virtually ignored Cooke. C. T. Copeland reviewed only her last volume, Huckleberries, in a brief criticism that concluded, “Mrs. Cooke draws her lines sharply, and succeeds perfectly with plain, strong characters, and with the kind of scene which on the stage is said to play itself; but the attempt to deal with subtlety or complexity of any kind is apt to result in a rather hard inadequacy” (Atlantic, 69 [Feb 1892], 268). Other reviewers were as brief but kinder; the Nation praised the book for its accurate portrayal of “the steadfast courage, the shamefaced tenderness, and the dogged obstinacy (sometimes called ‘pure cussedness’) which, in combination, produce the full-flavored human fruit of New England soil” (Nation, 53 [31 Dec 1891], 512). Cooke's work never attracted wide critical notice, however, and by 1907, Bliss Perry could recall in a reminiscence for the Atlantic's one-hundredth volume that Cooke was one of the magazine's most neglected contributors, “whose achievement as a pioneer in the field in which Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, and Miss Alice Brown have since wrought so notably still awaits due recognition by the critics” (Atlantic, 100 [Nov 1907], 668).

During her lifetime, only the devoted efforts of her friends kept Cooke's reputation from disappearing altogether. Harriet Prescott Spofford, for example, wrote an impressionistic and appreciative memoir on Cooke for Our Famous Women (Hartford, Conn.: Worthington, 1884), a favor Cooke returned in the same volume with an essay on Spofford. Spofford amplified her impressions in A Little Book of Friends (Boston: Little, Brown, 1916), in which she claimed that Cooke's New England tales were “the first of the dialect stories … since the old days of Judge Haliburton and of Seba Smith,” adding that Cooke strove for a different effect in her “transcripts of genuine life, the interest interwoven with pure wit and humor, sweetness and tenderness” (144). Similar in tone was Laura C. Holloway Langford's sketch of Cooke in The Woman's Story (NY: Hurst, 1889), 531-532.

Cooke received her first substantial evaluation from Fred Lewis Pattee in his A History of American Literature Since 1870 (NY: Century, 1915). He assigned her a high place among local-color writers: “none other has shown the whole of New England with the sympathy and comprehension and the delicacy of Rose Terry Cooke” (221). Pattee's later study, The Development of the American Short Story (NY and London: Harper, 1923), contains one of the best short essays yet written on Cooke (169-170, 173-178). Pattee did not spark a Cooke revival, however. By the 1920's, when Freeman and Alice Brown were still popular and Jewett was the subject of F. O. Matthiessen's full-length study, Cooke had almost disappeared from view, except for occasional stories included in anthologies. Edward J. O'Brien noted in his The Advance of the American Short Story (NY: Dodd, Mead, 1923) that it seemed “odd” that Cooke's best tales had not yet found their permanent audience, since she was “the pioneer and one of the most important figures among the many chroniclers of New England country life” (96).

With the revival of interest in the backgrounds of American literature and in regional writers during the 1930's, Cooke began to receive renewed attention. Her importance was acknowledged in Matthiessen's “New England Stories,” in American Writers on American Literature, ed. John Macy (NY: Liveright, 1931); Vernon Parrington's The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1930) and Walter Blair's Native American Humor (NY: American Book, 1937), though none discussed her work at any length. May Lamberton Becker included a Cooke story with commentary in Golden Tales of New England (NY: Dodd, Mead, 1931), as did Harry Warfel and G. Harrison Orians in their American Local-Color Stories (NY: American Book, 1941).

Two critical analyses of Cooke's work that appeared during the 1940's have remained among the best comment on her fiction. Van Wyck Brooks cited her in New England Indian Summer (NY: Dutton, 1940) as “the founder of the school that produced Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins and Alice Brown,” although he admitted that her “world was singularly charmless” in its “paleness and leanness.” Brooks regarded Cooke's stories as valuable cultural history, and he felt that in their “harsh veracity” the tales “Too Late” and “Some Account of Thomas Tucker” foreshadowed later interpretations of “volcanoes under the placid hollows” of New England life by writers like Wharton, Robinson, Frost, and O'Neill. Babette Levy's discriminating essay “Mutations in New England Local Color” offered a comparative judgment on Cooke's achievement (New England Quarterly, 19 [Sep 1946], 338-358). Levy found that unlike Stowe, Freeman, and Jewett, Cooke “admitted (as her contemporaries apparently did not) that there were lower depths of poverty than genteel half-starvation in a neat little village home” (346). Although Levy noted frequent sentimentality and religious fervor blurring some of Cooke's stories, she commended her “recognition of some unpleasant aspects of this world's struggles.” Levy singled out for special praise Cooke's portraits of sanctimonious and hypocritical church members and deacons in tales like “Mrs. Flint's Married Experience” and “Judged.”

Continuing Levy's examinations of New England local color in a fuller study, Perry Westbrook in Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (Washington, D. C.: Scarecrow, 1951), disposed of most of Cooke's work as belonging “deep in the trash-bin of Victorian sentimentality” (91) but found that “scattered through her collections she has left a handful of tales which rank with the best of American local color realism.” Particularly praising Cooke's tales that deal with willful and wrong-headed characters or with humorous incident, Westbrook analyzed in detail “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence,” “Cal Culver and the Devil” and “Polly Mariner, Tailoress.” Westbrook's indispensable study, both in its critical comment and in its suggestive bibliography, is a perceptive guide to New England local color.

During the 1950's, Cooke continued to appear in critical histories. Floyd Stovall cited her “Miss Lucinda” as an important local-color sketch in Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (Durham: Duke U Press, 1953). James C. Austin documented her editorial relationship with James T. Fields in Fields of The Atlantic Monthly (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1953), 317-319, and claimed she was “the best of the female contributors of the generation born in the thirties,” an echo of Bliss Perry's remark half a century earlier. Most important for Cooke's reputation, Jean Downey published her bibliography of writings by and about Cooke in 1955 (see Bibliography).

In 1956, Downey's dissertation, “A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke,” was completed at the University of Ottawa. This unpublished study is the single most important work to date on Cooke's life and writings, and the most comprehensive source for biographical information. Although Downey does not treat either Cooke's poetry or single works extensively, she does establish Cooke as New England's first short-story writer to make the transition from romanticism to the beginnings of realism through local-color fiction. In 1960, Katharine Jobes included Cooke in her dissertation at Yale, “The Resolution of Solitude: A Study of Four Writers of the New England Decline,” a study focusing on the common theme of solitude and the need for personal relationships in the work of Cooke, Stowe, Freeman, and Jewett. In 1969, Susan Allen Toth's dissertation at Minnesota, “More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Alice Brown,” assessed Cooke's contribution to the development of the American short story, with particular attention to her treatment of the so-called “woman question.”

The only recent published attempt to re-evaluate Cooke's achievement is Jay Martin's brief analysis in Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 139-142. Although Martin oversimplifies Cooke's work by dividing it into tales of New England saints and sinners, a category that somewhat limits understanding of her range, he relates Cooke to her time with several illuminating insights. Martin's account unfortunately contains several factual errors, such as his claim that Cooke was the Atlantic's foremost contributor of short stories until her death in 1891. (Of the twenty-one stories she published in the Atlantic, only a few appeared after 1870.) Martin seems to have depended for such information on an interesting but unreliable source, Ima Honaker Herron's The Small Town in American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke U Press, 1939).

Other current studies of this period, such as Warner Berthoff's The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919 (NY: Free Press, 1965), Larzer Ziff's The American 1890s: Life and Times of A Lost Generation (NY: Viking, 1966), and Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U Press, 1966), do not mention Cooke at all.

II. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean Downey published a nearly complete bibliography of writings by and about Cooke in “Rose Terry Cooke: A Bibliography,” [Part 1], Bulletin of Bibliography, 21 (May-Aug 1955), 159-162; “Part II,” 21 (Sep-Dec 1955), 191-192. Downey lists books by Cooke; reviews of her books; her contributions to periodicals, both fiction and nonfiction; anthologies containing stories by Cooke; and sources for biography, history, and criticism of Cooke's work. Downey also itemizes the Cooke collection at the Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Downey does not offer the first published source for several of Cooke's stories later collected in The Sphinx's Children and in Huckleberries. She also does not list one story by Cooke that has completely disappeared from her canon for an interesting reason: the story, a sharply satiric anti-utopian sketch called “Knoware,” was written for Harper's in December 1878 and signed “B. Munn Chowson,” an obvious parody of Baron Munchausen. Harper's cumulative index includes it not under Cooke's name, but under that of Mr. Chowson.

J. N. Blanck's Bibliography of American Literature (New Haven: Yale U Press, 1957), has a full descriptive listing of Cooke's published work (II, 266-275).

III. EDITIONS, REPRINTS, AND PUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT MATERIAL

Until very recently, all of Cooke's work was out of print with the exception of occasional stories in anthologies. In 1969, however, the Garrett Press issued reprints of Somebody's Neighbors, The Sphinx's Children, and Huckleberries as Vols. 41, 42, and 43 in the American Short Story Series, edited by Clarence Gohdes. These are Cooke's principal collections, supplemented by Root-Bound and Other Sketches, which was issued in 1968 as a reprint by the Gregg Press in the Americans in Fiction series.

Cooke's New England novel, Steadfast: The Story of A Saint and A Sinner (Boston: Ticknor, 1889), remains unavailable, despite its interest as local-color realism. The idea for this novel was suggested by Whittier to Cooke in 1881, when he wrote to her, “Why don't thee undertake a longer story, not altogether confined to the uncultured farmhand dialect and character—but a story of New England life in its varied aspects?” Cooke's religious stories, often written for children, such as No (NY: Phillips and Hunt, 1886) and Little Foxes (Philadelphia: Altemus, 1904), are also out of print, as is Happy Dodd: Or, “She Hath Done What She Could” (Boston: Henry Hoyt, 1878), a novel whose realistic passages were praised by Babette Levy (above).

Jean Downey has published several of Cooke's letters in the only recent periodical attention given to Cooke: “Whittier and Cooke: Unpublished Letters,” Quaker History: the Bulletin of the Friends Historical Association, 52 (Spring 1963, and “Atlantic Friends: Howells and Cooke,” American Notes and Queries, 1 (May 1963), 132-133. Cooke's relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett, as revealed in correspondence, will be documented in a forthcoming essay by Susan Allen Toth in Studies in Short Fiction.

IV. MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Downey asserts in her bibliographical article that “family correspondence is said to have been destroyed by Mrs. Cooke's last close relative, a niece, Alice Collins, who died in 1939.” Scattered letters are available in several university libraries, the Huntington Library, and the Library of Congress, the latter of which holds her correspondence with the publisher Benjamin H. Ticknor, a sad record of Cooke's desperate need for money and her willingness to do hack work for it. The Houghton Library at Harvard has eleven letters by Cooke, including several to William Dean Howells that cast light on her literary tastes. Yale holds several letters from Cooke to Ticknor, Edward Bok, and James Russell Lowell. At the Connecticut Historical Society one may consult letters to Cooke from Frances Willard, Whittier, Albion Tourgee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Nora Perry, Sarah Orne Jewett, Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, Annie Fields, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Mark Twain. Cooke's literary friendships offer fascinating and unexplored territory.

At the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, there is a special Cooke collection, including some manuscripts. Harvard also holds an unpublished manuscript entitled “What Women Should Be Thankful for,” an instructive comment on Cooke's often ambivalent feelings about women.

With the exception of Cooke's letters to Whittier and Howells as reported in Downey's articles, and Cooke's correspondence with James T. Fields as cited in Austin's Fields of The Atlantic Monthly, none of her letters have been edited or published.

V. AREAS NEEDING FURTHER ATTENTION

Although Cooke's contributions to New England local color have been examined, usually in a brief and repetitive manner, her full development as a popular writer in the context of the period in which she wrote, the 1850's to 1890's, has never been thoroughly explored. Her adaptations of style to suit popular taste, her often confused progress from melodramatic romance to realism, and her religious tracts all offer insights into changing attitudes of the time.

Several of Cooke's innovations in fiction, such as her development of the sketch form, her use of dialect speech, and her introduction of uncompromisingly commonplace characters, all need to be further scrutinized. Her attitude towards her female characters also deserves renewed attention. Some stories contain fierce diatribes against marriage, as well as case histories of unhappy women, while other tales exalt woman's idealistic role in the most stereotyped mid-century terms. Since Cooke also helped to create the fictional image of “the American girl,” who replaced the traditional melodramatic heroine, her fiction is an important source for changing attitudes towards women.

Cooke's dry, sometimes bitter humor has never been fully appreciated. Her New England characters helped to set certain humorous types, such as the sharp-tongued, quick-witted spinster and the laconic, slow-moving farmer. Her contribution to American humor should be evaluated.

Most of all, Cooke's best work should be edited and made available for a wider audience. She has remained too long in the dusty niche conveniently labeled “local-color realism.”