Philip Pendleton Cooke, an antebellum Romantic writer, is important for his interesting and perceptive essays, as well as his four completed novelettes, which capture much of the spirit and scenery of western Virginia of the 1830s and 1840s. His only collection of poetry, Froissart Ballads, and Other Poems (1847), illustrates themes typical of early Southern poetry--the placing of woman on a pedestal, the love of nature, the presentation of problems facing aristocratic society of the Shenandoah region, problems of frontier life in colonial times, and a fascination with the medieval past--themes that appear in his short fiction, as well. He also had a close relationship with the Southern Literary Messenger from its beginning.

Cooke was born on 26 October 1816 in Martinsburg, Berkeley County, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of Maria Pendleton and John Rogers Cooke. The Pendletons and the Cookes, originally from England, were of distinguished backgrounds. After the...