SOURCE: Spofford, Harriet Prescott. “Rose Terry Cooke,” in A Little Book of Friends, pp. 143-156. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916.

In the following essay, Spofford offers her personal observations on Cooke's life and career.

With what pleasure the circle of girls of which I was one read Rose Terry's stories in the first Atlantic magazines! We went across the river to a place of woods and rejoiced in the Autocrat and in Rose Terry. That we could ever know Rose Terry and call her Rose never entered our heads. She was far away in upper skies. Hers were the first of the dialect stories (although Mrs. Stowe's were nearly of the same period) since the old days of Judge Haliburton and of Seba Smith; and they were of a very different order from those earlier ones, not of that type of buffoonery, but transcripts of genuine life, the...