SOURCE: Walker, Cheryl. “Profile: Rose Terry Cooke, 1827-1892.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 9, no. 2 (fall 1992): 143-49.

In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of Cooke's career as a prolific writer of realistic short stories and romantic poetry.

At least two Rose Terry Cookes command our attention a hundred years after the historical woman's death. One, the writer of realist short stories, has long been recognized as a pioneer of New England regional fiction, an innovator in the use of dialect, and the forerunner of works by Rebecca Harding Davis and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others.¹ This Rose Terry (as she was known until her marriage to Rollin Cooke in 1873) wrote the lead story for the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly, published in 1857. In New England: Indian Summer (1940) Van Wyck Brooks praised her early efforts, saying “some of these tales, with their note of harsh...