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)

Academe: Notable American espionage novels.

James Fenimore Cooper. NYPL

For the blog of Academe magazine (published by the American Association of University Professors), Martin Kich (Wright State University) is crafting a series of posts on "Fifty Notable American Espionage Novels" (he is up to no. 29). His choices include the following:

James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy (1821)
Richard Congdon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
Brian Garfield, Hopscotch (1975)
Dorothy Gilman, The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax (1970)
James Grady, Six Days of the Condor (1975)
Bill Granger, The November Man (1979)
Nicholas M. Guild, The Summer Soldier (1978)
Noel Hynd & Christopher Creighton,  The Krushchev Objective (1987)
Aaron Latham, Orchids for Mother (1977)
Robert Littell, The Amateur (1981)

Happy birthday, Charles Brockden Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown.
NYPL.

Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown, who may be the first professional writer in the United States, was born today in Philadelphia in 1771. His best-known novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), was praised by James Fenimore Cooper in 1827 as "a never-failing evidence of genius." He died in 1810.

A bully reader: TR's favorite books.

The following is information I've gleaned on some of the favorite books of Theodore Roosevelt from various sources (according to his autobiography [18], he was not allowed to read dime novels when he was a child, which apparently did not thwart him from obtaining a few. He was forbidden to read Ouida's Under Two Flags but did so anyway):

• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Little Men, and An Old-Fashioned Girl (according to TR's autobiography)

• James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales (several sources)
  

• George William Curtis, The Potiphar Papers (according to David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback)

• Dante's Divine Comedy (according to J. A. Zahm—see below for source)
  

• Inazo Nitobe, Bushido (according to Donald Keene's Emperor of Japan)

• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (according to TR's autobiography)
  

• Theodore S. Van Dyke, The Still-Hunter (on deer hunting; TR blurbed the book)
  

• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (reported by Wells after his 1906 White House visit)

What TR didn't like to read:

• Hamlet

• Jane Austen

Roosevelt's concentration of mind when reading was quite as remarkable as his ability to read at any and all times and under the most unfavorable circumstances without inconvenience or annoyance. When interested in a book, he seemed to be absolutely dead, for the time being, to all the rest of the world. Noise did not affect him in the least. He could sit in the midst of a talking, shouting crowd and be totally oblivious of and insensible to everything but the contents of the volume in his hands.
— J. A. Zahm, C.S.C., "Theodore Roosevelt as a Hunter-Naturalist," The Outlook 121 (March 1919): 435

About the image: TR reads, ca. 1904. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Bloomsbury April 23rd book auction results.

Some highlights from Bloomsbury's April 23rd literature auction:

• First English edition of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1822; novel about a spy for George Washington during the Revolutionary War; Cooper's second novel): valued at £400–600, sold for £1300 (approximately $1900)
  

• First edition of M.R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), £550 (approximately $809)
  

• First serialized edition of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1935), valued at £60-80, sold for £360 (approximately $530)
  

• Signed copy of the autobiographical She Goes to War (1942) by Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters), £280 (approximately $412)
  

• Signed first edition of John le Carre's Call for the Dead (1961), £3000 (approximately $4414)
  

• Signed first edition of James Crumley's The Wrong Case (1975), £160 (approximately $235)
  

• First edition of Colin Dexter's The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977), £420 (approximately $618)
  

• First edition of Lindsey Davis's The Silver Pigs (1989), £170 (approximately $250)
  

Sadly, the copies of Leslie Charteris's The Saint vs. Scotland Yard and The Saint and Mr. Teal that I mentioned in this post went unsold (as did copies of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye).

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.