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Tales for Fifteen or Imagination and Heart

by James Fenimore Cooper

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Available editions of Tales for Fifteen or Imagination and Heart

	9788132000853, Paperback, Tutis Digital Pub, 2008 $11.72 (NEW) Other copies of 9788132000853

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on Sep 11 2009, feeney said:

"James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) was America's first great novelist. In the 1820s and later he experimented with writing after the fashion of currently marketable British and Irish writers, including especially Sir Walter Scott. One of Cooper's models was Englishwoman Mrs Amelia Anderson Opie (1769-1853) a sometime Unitarian, later Quaker and occasional radical. Mrs Opie aimed to make her readers cry and wrote increasingly about correct moral behavior in young women. *** In apparent imitation of Mrs Opie, Fenimore Cooper, in TALES FOR FIFTEEN, published two yarns (think of them as very long short stories or very short novellas) "Imagination" and "Heart." Cooper remained concerned for the proper upbringing of girls; and occasional moralizing about their temptations and responses appeared in his five LEATHERSTOCKING novels and others. *** The "fifteen" in TALES FOR FIFTEEN refers to 15-year old girls. Cooper's narrative "voice" was that of a fictitious "Jane Morgan." In effect, in both tales an experienced, worldly-wise older woman tells stories of late teen-age girls, with her cautionary advice. *** In his Preface to these stories, Cooper wrote: "They are intended for the perusal of young women, at that tender age when the feelings of their nature begin to act on them most insidiously, and when their minds are least prepared by reason and experience to contend with their passions." Both tales are set in or near Manhattan shortly after the War of 1812. *** "Imagination' is about two teen-age girls Julia Warren and Anna Miller. For financial reasons, Anna's father moves her and a dozen other members of his family 200 miles from Manhattan to the Genesee frontier area of New York State. Julia is devastated and weeps for the absence of her soul-mate. Anna, in a series of letters, works on orphaned Julia to persuade Julia's aunt, Miss Emmerson (with whom she lives) to invite Anna back from the wilds to winter in gay, lively Manhattan. Anna writes Julia how she sings by day and by night Julia's praise to a handsome young man who plans to come to the big city to woo Julia. Julia's imagination runs amuck magnifying the virtues of her absent girl friend and painting an ideal picture of the young Lochinvar she thinks is coming to make her his own. Meanwhile Aunt Emmerson, a simple woman, pours kindly but cold water on Julia's over-heated imagination in attempts to make her notice Anna's selfish, manipulative flaws and to see and appreciate the quiet, ordinary virtues of friends and relatives of Julia who are close at hand. *** "Heart" is about Manhattan's young Charlotte Henley and her quiet love for sickly friend George Morton. The town is abuzz with the current manhunt by all the eligible belles to wed a young bachelor, immensely rich, handsome polished Seymour Delafield. Charlotte's best girl friend duly makes her own play for Seymour, but Seymour falls madly in love with Miss Henley. Whom will Charlotte choose: rich, robust Seymour or self-sacrificing, desperately ill George? What was Cooper up to in these two short stories for teens? TALES FOR FIFTEEN more closely resembles the American novelist's first novel of English manners, PRECAUTION, than his later novels of wilderness and the high seas. Shortly after "Imagination" and "Heart" Cooper published LIONEL LINCOLN, a tale of revolutionary Boston in 1775-1776, heavily laced with Gothic mysteries. His English models for stories of youthful romances abounded in Gothic elements such as kidnappings and seductions. These motifs do not, however, appear in TALES FOR FIFTEEN. Young readers of "Imagination" and "Heart" would very likely have wept, heaved bosoms, sighed and dreamt idealistically of their own future husbands. Yet in fictional but realistic, plausible circumstances, real, literate, middle-class and upper-class teens would have faced with Cooper: wealth versus relative poverty, health versus sickness, an adored girl friend out for her own selfish purposes and on and on. Enjoy these undemanding, pleasant, real feeling yarns of teen-age romance in New York just after the annoying War of 1812. -OOO-"

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