Rural Hours

by Susan Cooper, Thomas F. O'Donnell (Foreword by), David Jones (Introduction)

Overview

Nature and the mid nineteenth-century American landscape is beautifully revealed in this journal of the seasons. Susan Fennimore Cooper, daughter of the great American novelist, wrote this book in 1850, four years before Walden was published. She described it as her "simple record of those little events which make up the course of the seasons in rural life."

As with the works of Thoreau and others in this contemplative genre, including that of Joseph Wood Krutch and Henry Besten, Cooper's work, with its treasury of information about a way of life of which only remnants remain, is for the nature lover, the folklorist, and history buff.

This is the first paperback edition of a book that, when it was originally published, William Cullen Bryant called" one of the sweetest books ever printed." It went through several editions during Cooper's life and was very popular in the United States and England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815603177
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	08/15/1995
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	337
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) was a writer who published on diverse subjects, but she is best remembered as a nature writer. The daughter of writer James Fenimore Cooper.

What People are Saying About This

Lawrence Buell

"An engaging, astutely, sensitively, and eloquently written work by the first really significant American woman nature writer."

Editorial Reviews

Susan Cooper was thirty-seven years old when Rural Hours first appeared in 1850. She was twice that age--a vigorous seventy-four--when she trimmed it to the tastes of a new generation in 1887. 'The present edition is a revised one, she explained briefly in a new preface which was itself a condensed version of the original, and some passages not needed to-day have been omitted.'-- "From the foreword"

From the Publisher

Rural Hours should interest students of American geography, history, and literature as an important early work of nature writing. It is a significant literary achievement by a woman who has too long languished in the shadow of her famous father.

Louise Westling

An engagingly, astutely, sensitively, and eloquently written work by the first really significant American woman nature writer.

Harvard University - Lawrence Buell