She was an exceedingly sensitive child, too, and her imagination was by no means dwarfed by the servants who told her ghost stories, the most noted of these servants being Athanasius, a Greek boy who escaped from the Turkish massacre. After her father lost his property in the Morus Multicaulis Speculation, the family moved to Hartford, taking up their residence in a large brick mansion built in 1799 by Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth for his daughter, who had married Nathaniel Terry. When Cooke was about ten, she was sent to the Hartford Female Seminary where she asked to be admitted to a special class considered far beyond her grade level, being instruction in literature and composition given by the principal, John P. Brace. Brace had been an instructor in the school where Cooke's mother received her education. While at the Hartford Female Seminary, "For her own entertainment [Cooke] wrote poems and dramas for her friends". She graduated in 1843, at the age sixteen. In that same year, she joined the Congregational Church. Both parents raised Cooke in the severest puritanical habits and absolutely restricted her from the company of young men. But that did not prevent the feelings of youth, suppressed in real life, from overflowing into printed verse. Career Immediately after graduation, Cooke began to teach in Hartford although she did not remain there for long. She then took a position in a Presbyterian church school in Burlington, New Jersey. In the fourth year there, she became a governess in the family of the clergyman, William Van Rensselaer. After a while, feeling the need there was of her at home, she returned to Hartford and began her literary life. Terry's first published poem appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1851 and received high praise from the editor Charles A. Dana. In 1855, she published "The Mormon's Wife" in Graham's Magazine, of which Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote that it "dealt powerfully with the leprosy of Mormonism, and wrung from the heart tears dried only by the heat of indignation," and interpreted the story as early evidence of Cooke's "intuitions of genius... a genius [which] became the ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry." This was followed by a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, the leading story in the first number. Around 1858, when Rose was about twenty-nine her idolized sister Alice, younger than herself by nearly five