Widely regarded as the best of Hamlin Garland’s novels, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly tells the story of a country girl of precocious ability who is raised by her widower father on a small Wisconsin farm. She wants to be a poet and eventually attends the university, where her talent is encouraged. A carefully crafted defense of the New Woman, the first generation of women to achieve economic and social independence, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly deals with issues that are still with us—the nature of femininity, the problem of reconciling career and family, the meaning of “love,” and the need for equal opportunity. Above all, it records a nineteenth-century man’s vision of a world that still eludes us, one in which men and women are equal partners. This edition reprints the text of the 1895 printing and includes an introduction that places the novel in the historical context of the early feminist movement.

Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) is best known for his collection of short stories Main-Travelled Roads, available in a Bison Books edition, and for his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. Keith Newlin is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of Hamlin Garland: A Bibliography, with a Checklist of Unpublished Letters and the coeditor of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland (Nebraska 1998).

“Easily Garland’s finest novel.”—Great Lakes Review