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Rose Terry Cooke

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Rose Terry Cooke from American Women, 1897

Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), from American Women, 1897. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rose Terry Cooke (February 17, 1827 - July 18, 1892) was an American poet and short story writer.

Life[]

Cooke was born Rose Terry in West Hartford, Connecticut,[1] to Henry Wadsworth Terry and Anne Wright (Hurlbut).

She went to the Hartford Female Seminary where "For her own entertainment she wrote poems and dramas for her friends".[2] She graduated from the seminary at age 16, and the same year became a member of the Congregational Church, and began teaching at a Presbyterian church in Burlington, New Jersey, and working as a governess for the family of clergyman William Van Rensselaer.

In 1860 she published a volume of poems, and in 1888 she published additional verse in her Complete Poems.[1]

After her marriage in 1873 to Rollin H. Cooke she became best known for her fresh and humorous stories, dealing mainly with New England country life.[1] Her chief volumes of fiction were Happy Dodd: or, She Hath Done What She Could (1878), Somebody's Neighbors (1881), Root-bound and Other Sketches (1885), The Sphinx's Children and Other People's (1886), No: A Story for Boys.(1886), Steadfast (1889) and Huckleberries Gathered From the New England Hills (1891).[3]

She died at Pittsfield, Massachusetts on July 18, 1892.[1]

Writing[]

Terry's first published poem appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1851 and received high praise[2] from the editor, Charles A. Dana. In 1855 she published "The Mormon's Wife" in Graham's Magazine; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote that it "dealt powerfully with the leprosy of Mormonism, and wrung from the heart tears dried only by the heat of indignation," and interpreted the story as early evidence of Cooke's "intuitions of genius ... the ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry."[4]

Critical introduction[]

by Fred Lewis Patee

Rose Terry (1827-92), later better known as Rose Terry Cooke, has the distinction of having contributed seven short stories to the first eight numbers of The Atlantic. Born in Connecticut — the heart of New England, a school teacher with experience in country districts, she wrote with knowledge and conviction of the area of life that she knew. In her long series of stories beginning in the forties with unlocalized romantic tales in Graham’s and extending throughout the transition period into the seventies and eighties, and ending with a final collection as late as 1891, one may trace every phase of the American short story in half a century.

Her early Atlantic narratives lean decidedly in the direction of the Young Ladies’ Repository type of fiction, sentimental, leisurely, moralizing, and yet even in the poorest of them there is a sense of actuality that was new in American short fiction. They were not romances; they were homely fragments of New England rural life. The heroine may be introduced in this unromantic fashion: “Mrs. Griswold was paring apples and Lizzie straining squash.” Here for the first time we may find dialect that rings true, and, moreover, here for the first time are sprightliness and rollicking humour, varied at times with tragedy and true pathos.

As one traces her work from Atlantic to Atlantic, a gradual increase in power impresses one until after her declaration of independence at the opening of "Miss Lucinda" (August, 1861) — “I offer 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” — it is felt that she has found herself and that with her later work like "Odd Miss Todd," "Freedom Wheeler’s Controversy with Providence," "The Deacon’s Week," and last of all and in many ways her best, "The Town and Country Mouse," the final story in her collection Huckleberries, she has passed into the new period and taken a secure place with the small group of masters of the short story.

Unlike Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose gorgeous "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" fluttered for a time the readers of the early sixties, she was able to heed the voice of the new period and to grow and outgrow, and it was this power that made her the pioneer and the leader not only of the group of depicters of New England life, but of the whole later school of makers of localized short fiction realistically rendered.[5]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

Short fiction[]

Collected editions[]

  • An Anthology in Memoriam, 1827-1892. Bristol, IN: Bristol Banner Books, 1992.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[6]

See also[]

Ebb_And_Flow_(Rose_Terry_Cooke_Poem)

Ebb And Flow (Rose Terry Cooke Poem)

References[]

  • Eugene Ehrlich & Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 54. ISBN 0-19-503186-5
  • Kennedy, George A, Sallathiel Bump: A Reader's Companion to the Writings of Rose Terry Cooke. Written and published by George A Kennedy, PO Box 271880,Fort Collins CO 80527.
  • Lintner, Sylvia Chace "Cooke, Rose Terry" Notable American Women. Vol. 1, 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975.
  • "Cooke, Rose (Terry)," American Authors, 1600-1900. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1938.

Notes[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Cooke, Rose Terry, Encyclopædia Britannica 1911 Volume 7, 74. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 19, 2017.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lintner, 378-379
  3. ↑ Ehrlich, p. 54
  4. ↑ Our famous women: an authorized record of the lives and deeds of distinguished American women of our times; an entirely new work, full of romantic story, lively humor, thrilling experiences, tender pathos, and brilliant wit, with numerous anecdotes, incidents, and personal reminiscences by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Accessed June 30, 2012.
  5. ↑ Fred Lewis Patee, "Rose Terry Cooke," VI. The Short Story, Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume XVI, New York: Putnam / Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press, 1907–21. Bartleby.com, Web, Mar. 7, 2017.
  6. ↑ Search results = au:Rose Terry Cooke, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Mar. 19, 2017.

External links[]

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Books
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