SOURCE: Kleitz, Katherine. “Essence of New England: The Portraits of Rose Terry Cooke.” American Transcendental Quarterly, nos. 47-48 (summer/fall 1980): 127-39.

In the following essay, Kleitz explores Cooke's use of local features of landscape and climate as determining factors in the lives of her characters.

In 1857, thirty-year-old Rose Terry Cooke was respected enough to be honored by an invitation to write the first short story for the inaugural issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Yet, a hundred and twenty-five years later, Cooke's work has slipped out of a canon of literature which prefers to emphasize the writings of nineteenth-century male Romantics and transcendentalists rather than those of early local-color realists, coincidentally almost all female. Few remember that during the course of her life, Cooke wrote several hundred magazine stories, the majority of them set in New England. Along with marriage tales, holiday sketches, and overtly didactic moral anecdotes primarily...