Rural Hours

"An engaging, astutely, sensitively, and eloquently written work by the first really significant American woman nature writer". -- Lawrence Buell Rural Hours (1850) is one of the earliest pieces of American nature writing and the first by a woman. This new edition, the only printing of the full original text since 1876, restores passages excised by the author for an 1887 edition. The daughter of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) uses narratives and descriptions of her walks and excursions to reveal her ideal society as a rural one, carefully poised between the receding wilderness and a looming industrialization. She theorizes that knowledge of place causes people to approach the land humbly and gratefully and asserts the necessity of establishing a society that is sustainable in the natural world and that sees a moral obligation to deepen knowledge of the natural history of the environment.

In Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), daughter of the famed novelist James Fenimore Cooper, records a year in the life of the fields and woods surrounding her home in Cooperstown, New York. She writes with a keen eye for detail, noting, for example, the disappearance of local species as their habitat is given over to farmland ("all kinds of black-birds are rare here; they are said to have been very numerous indeed at the settlement of the country, but have very much diminished in numbers of late years"), and keeping track of changes in the weather, fluctuations in animal populations, and like matters. Rural Hours is considered to be the first extended piece of nature writing by an American woman, and as such it should be of interest to a wide range of readers, from naturalists to students of regional literature and women's history. --Gregory McNamee