SOURCE: Baym, Nina. “Susan Fenimore Cooper and Ladies' Science.” In American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences, pp. 73-90. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Baym depicts Cooper's nature writing as a means to present to women readers a rural life that reflects an educated, class-conscious, progressive society.

Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) showed how scientific knowledge contributed to an ideal of gracious country living for women.¹ The book's anonymous publication “by a Lady”—at a time when anonymous authorship had gone out of style—quaintly made the point that the author's name mattered less than her class affiliation.² The book is shaped as a journal kept almost daily throughout a year, beginning and ending in spring. It merges accounts of excursions in the Cooperstown environs with associated material pieced together from a huge array of print sources, most of them scientific.

Modern editors...