17 January 2024:
"There is nothing so attractive to a woman who is no longer young as the idea of a home. The shadow of age and its infirmities affrights her ; loneliness is a terror in the future; and the prospect of drifting about here and there, a dependent, poor, proud, unwelcome, when flesh and heart fail, and the ability to labor is gone, makes any permanent shelter a blessed prospect, and draws many a woman into a far more dreadful fate than the work-house mercies or the colder charity of relatives" (Cooke 99).
I haven't read this story, "Mrs. Flint's Married Experience," in years, but it still moves me, no doubt even more than it did when I was younger.
Rose Terry Cooke (the subject of the entry I am working on now) is a complicated woman, but I am glad to return to her.
Work Cited
Cooke, Rose Terry. "How Celia Changed Her Mind" and Selected Stories. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons, Rutgers UP, 1986.
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