Tales for Fifteen, or, Imagination and Heart by James Fenimore Cooper
page 3 of 196 (01%)
page 3 of 196 (01%)
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"Manner", and "Matter and Manner". Only
"Imagination" was completed; the half-written "Heart" was given a sudden and half-hearted ending; Cooper later asserted that he had allowed Charles Wiley to publish "Tales for Fifteen to help him out of some financial difficulties. In a letter to George Roberts in 1840, Cooper said of "Imagination" that "this tale was written on rainy day, half asleep and half awake, but I retain rather a favorable impression of it."} {"Imagination", remains an amusing and cleverly- plotted story of a young girl whose imagination gets the better of her, presumably because of reading romantic novels. This, of course, was a commonplace notion in the 1820s, except that Cooper's heroine, misled by circumstances, comes to believe that her romantic fantasies are happening. This Don Quixote-like twist is less common, though Jane Austen's famous "Northanger Abbey" and Eaton Stannard Barrett's little-known but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a slim (indeed, truncated) account of faithful love, sinks into bathos; it is, perhaps, most interesting for its opening scene of a blase New York City crowd gathering around a fallen man -- and doing nothing to help him.} {Spelling and punctuation are as in the 1823 |
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