Editor's Study

From Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 84 Issue 501 (February 1892)

A sense of this is what give their austere charm to the studies of New England life which Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke calls Huckleberries. The name intimates the whimsical humor which relieves their sadness and grimness, and imparts its freakish color to their tragedy. They are such stories as Miss Wilkins has made us familiar with of late; but we ought in justice to remember how long ago Mrs. Cooke began to write them, and how true she was in her art, when truth in art was considered a minor virtue if not a sordid detail. They are longer and looser in structure than Miss Wilkins's tales; they are not so fine as Miss Jewett's; but they are faithful and strong, and they are as important as any work of their kind, which, as the reader of the Study ought to know by this time, we think a very high and good kind. The present group does not vary greatly in kind or quality from that called Somebody's Neighbors, and other groups of Mrs. Cooke's short stories, which are all to be commended as the work of a poet and a moralist.