Cooper, Susan Augusta Fenimore

▪ American writer and philanthropist

born April 17, 1813, Mamaroneck, N.Y., U.S.

died Dec. 31, 1894, Cooperstown, N.Y.

      19th-century American writer and philanthropist, remembered for her writing and essays on nature and the rural life.

      Born at Heathcote Hill, the maternal De Lancey manor, Susan was the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, whom she served as devoted companion and amanuensis until his death in 1851. She was educated at home in Cooperstown, New York, until 1817, when the family moved to New York City; there, and from 1826 to 1833 in Europe, she attended private schools. In 1836 the family again settled in Cooperstown. With her father's encouragement she began to write, and in 1845 she published a novel, Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge, under the pseudonym Amabel Penfeather. Rural Hours (1850), her volume of fresh and graceful observations of nature and country life drawn from her journal, was very successful, enjoying several reprintings and appearing in revised editions in 1868 and 1887. In the same vein but less successful were Rhyme and Reason of Country Life (1854) and Rural Rambles (1854). As her father's literary executor she produced Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861) and the prefatory essays in the Household Edition of his works, published in 1876–84. She also published some magazine articles on her father and the biography William West Skiles, a Sketch of Missionary Life in Valle Crucis in Western North Carolina, 1842–1862 (1890). In 1865 she founded Thanksgiving Hospital in Cooperstown, and in 1873 she founded the Orphan House of the Holy Savior, which she personally superintended as it grew to house nearly a hundred children.

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