Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly was published by Stone and Kimball in Chicago in 1895, and it is Garland’s most novelistically ambitious work — a portrait of a young woman’s development that anticipates Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Willa Cather’s prairie novels by years.
Rose Dutcher grows up on a farm in a Wisconsin coulee (a narrow valley), the daughter of a widowed farmer. She is intelligent, ambitious, and physically vital — qualities that the coulee cannot accommodate. She attends the University of Wisconsin, where she encounters intellectual life for the first time, and then moves to Chicago, where she pursues a career as a writer and navigates the social and sexual complexities of urban life.
Garland’s treatment of Rose’s sexuality was remarkable for 1895 — he depicts her physical awareness, her attraction to men, and her struggle to reconcile desire with ambition without the moralizing that contemporary fiction demanded. Rose’s sexual feelings are presented as natural and healthy, not as a temptation to be resisted, and her eventual marriage is a partnership of equals rather than a woman’s surrender to domesticity.
Collecting Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly
First edition (Stone and Kimball, Chicago, 1895): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition: $60–$200
- Later editions: $10–$25