The many sides of Susan Fenimore Cooper.

The online Smithsonian exhibition "Early Women in Science" includes Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper recognized as an early naturalist via her work Rural Hours (1850). The younger Cooper's novel Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk of Longbridge (1846) features a mystery, although she warned in "The Talent of Reading Wisely" (Feb. 1892) of the dangers to youth of crime novels. She also did not support women's suffrage (see "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America," 1870).

The exhibition also features noted garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, whose surname is so prominently featured in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (her brother, Rev. Walter Jekyll, was a friend of Stevenson).

Related posts: Constance Fenimore Woolson
(great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper)

Happy birthday, Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Author and travel writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and friend of Henry James, was born today in New Hampshire in 1840. She died in 1894, when, suffering from an illness, she either fell or jumped from the third floor of her Venice home. She was a pioneer in discussing issues such as spousal abuse and race relations in her work, despite her publisher's attempts to stifle her on the latter subject. Her novel Anne (1882) has a detection element, in that the title character investigates a charge of murder against the man she loves.