Susan Fenimore Cooper

Though it has taken over a century, the world, at least the world of literature, is beginning to make something of both Rural Hours and Susan Fenimore Cooper's important position in American letters. [New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works] is to be commended for its range of diverse inquiries into Cooper's life and work. Certainly, it will encourage old and new readers of Cooper to expand and deepen their scholarship, and perhaps encourage a reassessment of all of those scribbling women of the nineteenth century buried in footnotes and reduced to brief abridgements.

Cooper's several other contributions to the archive of nature writing, like Rural Hours, show striking observational powers along with a rich command of natural history, especially botany and ornithology. . . . All in all, the collection is full of variety and insight.

The first book of criticism that focuses on Cooper as a significant literary voice. Though concentrating on Rural Hours, the fourteen essays collected here discuss much of her other work, including her essay "A Dissolving View" (1852) and her novel Elinor Wyllys (1845). These well-written and well-researched essays place Cooper in her familial, historical, and cultural contexts to offer new insights into her achievements as a writer and thinker. The introduction provides a helpful overview of Cooper's literary career, and scholars will find useful the two appendixes—chronological lists of Cooper's published work and her known letters and manuscripts. The reader comes away from the book with a new appreciation of Cooper's importance as a nineteenth-century nature writer and a new understanding of how her work looks ahead to contemporary environmental concerns and modes of observation. Rural Hours itself will repay scholarly investigation, and this collection will be a significant starting point for research.