Susan Fenimore Cooper was the first woman in the United States to publish a book of nature writing. Although she was not formally educated in botany, people interested in nature sought her expertise. Gifted and highly intelligent, she wrote prolifically in several genres for fifty years. Her first major work, Rural Hours (1850), was a popular success, and many journals accepted her work, but she was a pious and self-effacing woman whose desire to be known as an accomplished writer was limited by the bounds of her conservative views on a woman's role in society. Committed to the duties society expected of women of her social status, she firmly opposed any extension of women's rights. Although usually discussed in connection with her father, novelist James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Fenimore Cooper should be evaluated in light of her own literary and social contributions.

Because she wrote more about her father...