SOURCE: Elrod, Eileen Razzari. “Truth is Stranger than Non-Fiction: Gender, Religion, and Contradiction in Rose Terry Cooke.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 13, no. 2 (1996): 113-29.

In the following essay, Elrod discusses the contradictions between Cooke's apparent feminism as revealed in her fiction and her conservative and anti-feminist non-fiction writing.

Like many of the nineteenth-century New England writers who were her contemporaries, Rose Terry Cooke spent much of her literary career examining the effects of the religious history of her region on the lives of ordinary women and men. In particular, she explored the ways traditional New England religion had affected women, repeatedly suggesting that Calvinism was harder on women than on men, and denouncing the religious sanction of masculine tyranny, particularly within marital and ecclesiastical contexts. Many of her stories explore women's themes quite specifically, both within and outside of a religious context: for instance, the marginal...