Cooper and Grant divorced in 1983; she married the actor Hume Cronyn in 1996 and lives in Connecticut.
Cooper's first novel was a work of science fiction, Mandrake (1964), the story of a politician who unsuccessfully tries to rid the world of much of the human race with the help of "natural forces." It made no critical impression, and Cooper did not attempt further work in this genre, although a later novel, The Boggart (1993), employs elements of the youth subculture of computers.
Cooper is an advocate of fantasy for its capacity to provide social and ethical grounding in a world in which the impact of myth has been vitiated over time; this view is analogous to J. R. R. Tolkien's concept of "Recovery," one of the four functions of fantasy. Cooper's major fantasy deals with radically polarized forces in conflict, and such fantasy has been criticized, in general, as grounded in nostalgia for an outmoded, hierarchical worldview. Her fantasies counter this criticism to some degree by maintaining a tension between nostalgia and the inescapable yet difficult necessity for free choice.
Her work as a fantasy writer began with Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), a book that became the first of the Dark Is Rising sequence, although Cooper was not aware of its significance in that regard for nearly eight years.
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