Constance Fenimore Woolson's _Rodman the Keeper_, 1880, undoubtedly was a strong force in the new Southern revival. During the eighties Miss Woolson was regarded as the most promising of the younger writers. She was a grand niece of Cooper, a fact made much of, and she had written short stories of unusual brilliance, her collection, _Castle Nowhere_, indeed, ranking as a pioneer book in a new field. Again was she destined to be a pioneer. In 1873 the frail health of her mother sent her into the South and for six years she made her home in Florida, spending her summers in the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. During the rest of her life her stories were studies of Southern life and Southern conditions. Only _Anne_ of her novels and two late collections of Italian tales may be noted as exceptions. It was in _Rodman the Keeper_, a collection of her magazine stories of the late seventies, that the North found its first adequate picture of the territory over which had been fought the Civil War. The Tourgee novels, which had created a real sensation, were political documents, but here were studies carefully wrought by one who did not take sides. It showed the desolation wrought by the armies during the four years, the pathos of broken homes and ruined plantations, the rankling bitterness, especially in the hearts of women, the helpless pride of the survivors, and the curious differences between the Northern and the Southern temperaments. It was careful work. Contemporary opinion seemed to be voiced by the Boston _Literary World_: The stories "more thoroughly represent the South than anything of the kind that has been written since the war." Necessarily the standpoint was that of an observer from without. There was no dialect in the tales, there were no revealings of the heart of Southern life as in Harris and Page and the others who had arisen from the material they used, but there was beauty and pathos and a careful realism that carried conviction. A sketch like "Felipe," for example, is a prose idyl, "Up the Blue Ridge" is the Craddock region seen with Northern eyes, and the story that gives the title to the book catches the spirit of the defeated South as few writers not Southern born have ever done.