Rose Terry Cooke

Rose Terry Cooke

Rose Terry Cooke (February 17, 1827 – July 18, 1892) was an American author and poet.

Early life

Rose Terry was born in West Hartford, Connecticut 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".^[1] She graduated from the seminary at age sixteen and that same year became a member of the Congregational Church and began teaching at a Presbyterian church in Burlington, New Jersey and worked as a governess for the family of clergyman William Van Rensselaer.

Literary work

Steadfast (1889) by Rose Terry Cooke

Terry's first published poem appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1851 and received high praise^[1] from the editor Charles A. Dana. In 1855 she published "The Mormon's Wife" in Graham's Magazine, of which Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward 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... a genius [which] became the ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry."^[2] In 1860 she published a volume of poems, and in 1888 she published more verse with her Complete Poems. It was after her marriage in 1873 to Rollin H. Cooke that she became best known for her fresh and humorous stories. Her chief volumes of fiction dealing mainly with New England country life 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). She died at Pittsfield, Massachusetts on July 18, 1892.^[3]

Notes

1. Lintner, 378-379
2. 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.
3. Ehrlich, p. 54

References

• Ehrlich, Eugene and 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. H. W. Wilson Company, NY 1938.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Cooke, Rose Terry". Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Rose Terry Cooke Website (unavailable as of 5/23/06)
• Rose Terry Cooke: Works on the web, bibliography, links