SOURCE: Donovan, Josephine. “Rose Terry Cooke: Impoverished Wives and Spirited Spinsters,” in New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, pp. 68-81. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983.

In the following essay, Donovan examines Cooke's short stories, claiming that the author rejected romanticism and sentimentality and chose instead to depict the grim reality of rural life in New England and its devastating effect on women.

Born to an inheritance of hard labor … fighting with … the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate … rigorous [and] fatally changeful; a soil bitter and barren … without any excitement to stir the half-torpid brain, without any pleasure … the New England farmer becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts … hard, cruel, sensual, vindictive. … And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women … the daily dullness of work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish tyranny of husbands, to whom...