Rose Terry Cooke, together with her sister Connecticut writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a pioneer in the genre of the New England local-color short story, writing some of the earliest examples of American realistic fiction. While her overall achievement is uneven, her best stories rank among the finest short fiction.

Born to a distinguished Connecticut family, Rose Terry enjoyed a relatively privileged childhood. Her mother, Anne Wright Hurlbut, was the daughter of John Hurlbut, a shipbuilder who sailed on the first New England ship to circumnavigate the globe. Rose's father, Henry Wadsworth Terry, was on his maternal side a descendant of the New England Wadsworth family to which poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also belonged. Her paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Terry, was president of a Hartford bank and a member of the U.S. Congress. Cooke dedicated her novel Happy Dodd (1878) to her mother for encouraging her to write and...