Quick Facts
Biography
Rose Terry Cooke (February 17, 1827 – July 18, 1892) was an American author and poet.
Early life
Rose Terry was born in West Hartford, Connecticut to Henry Wadsworth Terry and Anne Wright Hurlbut. She went to the Hartford Female Seminary where, "For her own entertainment she wrote poems and dramas for her friends". She graduated from the seminary at age sixteen and that same year became a member of the Congregational Church and began teaching at a Presbyterian church in Burlington, New Jersey and worked as a governess for the family of clergyman William Van Rensselaer.
Literary work
Terry's first published poem appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1851 and received high praise from the editor Charles A. Dana. In 1855 she published "The Mormon's Wife" in Graham's Magazine, of which Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote that it "dealt powerfully with the leprosy of Mormonism, and wrung from the heart tears dried only by the heat of indignation," and interpreted the story as early evidence of Cooke's "intuitions of genius... a genius [which] became the ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry." In 1860 she published a volume of poems, and in 1888 she published more verse with her Complete Poems. It was after her marriage in 1873 to Rollin H. Cooke that she became best known for her fresh and humorous stories. Her chief volumes of fiction dealing mainly with New England country life were Happy Dodd: or, She Hath Done What She Could (1878), Somebody's Neighbors (1881), Root-bound and Other Sketches (1885), The Sphinx's Children and Other People's (1886), No: A Story for Boys (1886), Steadfast (1889) and Huckleberries Gathered From the New England Hills (1891). She died at Pittsfield, Massachusetts on July 18, 1892.