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...