Susan fenimore cooper rural hours

Susan cooper
Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper was an American writer and amateur naturalist.
As America's first recognized female nature writer, Cooper broke new ground with a book about her observations of plant and animal life in Cooperstown, New.

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Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894)

She acted as her father's secretary and often travelled with him. In turn, he encouraged her with her writing and artwork. The work for which she is best remembered is Rural Hours (1850), published anonymously "by a lady". In it she records life in rural New York with astonishing detail and it also features many of her watercolors of birds, flora and fauna. It even caught the eye of the great Charles Darwin who wrote to Asa Gray: "Talking of books, I am in middle of one which pleases me… 'Miss Cooper’s Journal of a Naturalist'. Who is she? She seems a very clever woman & gives a capital account of the battle between our & your weeds". Rural Hours has been called the, "first major work of environmental literary nonfiction by an American woman writer, both a source and a rival of Thoreau's Walden." Susan lived for a period in Switzerland before returning to Cooperstown (named for her grandfather) where she lived with her other unmarried sister at Byberry Cottage. She is also remembered for establishing an orphanage at Coop

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Susan Fenimore Cooper — Child of Genius

Anna K. Cunningham (A resident of Cooperstown) *

Published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. 42, pp. 339-350, 1944, and in New York History, July 1944.

Placed online with the kind permission of the New York State Historical Association.

[May be reproduced for instructional use by individuals or institutions; commercial use prohibited.]

IN THE summer of 1813 young James Cooper (the Fenimore was not formally added until an act of the New York State Legislature in 1826) drove with his wife and infant daughters, Elizabeth and Susan Augusta, from Mamaroneck up to Cooperstown, the settlement founded by his father, Judge William Cooper. James Cooper brought his little family over the old Cherry Valley Turnpike down into Otsego in a carriage which he called — in the vocabulary of a seafaring man, 1 — the “rasée”. The little party in the rasée, drawn by a team of greys, stopped to rest at Cherry Valley. There the elder of the two little girls, Elizabeth, was fed some over-ripe strawberries and she died

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Susan Fenimore Cooper

Miss Susan Fenimore Cooper, probably in the middle 1850’s. Photograph by W. G. Smith, Cooperstown.

This section is devoted to the life and writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), eldest daughter of James Fenimore Cooper and a distinguished writer and naturalist. She is best known for her nature diary of Cooperstown, Rural Hours, first published in 1850 and frequently reprinted. But she also wrote a novel, Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge (1846), short stories, children’s stories, and articles on a wide variety of subjects including nature. We propose to gather material about her in this section of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, until such time as a Susan Fenimore Cooper Society is organized.

Texts at this Site

(1846) Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge, Volume I; Volume II. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846. SFC’s only published, and almost forgotten, novel. It is nevertheless good reading, combining two sub-plots: one romantic (the trials and eventual happiness of the orphaned Elinor, who has every good quali