Freeman, Mrs. Mary Eleanor Wilkins

Mrs. Mary Eleanor Wilkins (1862-), an American novelist. She was born in Randolph, Massachusetts. She was educated at Mount Holyoke Seminary, and has spent her life in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. In 1886 her short stories of New England life began to attract attention. Her ability seems to lie in selecting some life, barren and forlorn in external circumstances, and arousing interest and sympathy, not on account of these circumstances, but in the mental, moral, or spiritual development of the individual. She does this so artistically as to seem artless. She uses Anglo-Saxon words and short sentences, and seems to make bare statement of the barest facts; but her characters stand out like photographs. A sense of humor, an insight into human motives, and a sympathy with the joys and sorrows of common lives have given her the power which places her in the front rank of American short story writers. A Humble Romance, A Conflict Ended, A New England Nun, and A Village Lear are among the best of these stories. Mrs. Freeman is the author of several novels of varying merit. Madelon is a romantic tale, involving some character study. By the Light of the Soul is the unhappy story of a motherless girl, who, with no guide but the "light of her soul," makes mistakes which border on the ridiculous and bring their conscientious perpetrator into no end of difficulty and misery. The story is morbid and unnatural. The Portion of Labor is as different from the preceding as it is possible for two stories of persons living in the same state of society to be. It is a labor problem tale. Strong, fine, suggestive, it presents forcibly the idea suggested by the title that to each individual belongs a share of the work of the world. The commonplace man who in the gradual development of this thought finds satisfaction in his life of hardship and struggle seems, for himself at least, to have solved the problem of life and of his relations to his fellow man. Mrs. Freeman's writings include Jane Field, Pembroke, Jerome, A Poor Man, Fair Lavinia and Other Stories, Love of Parson Lord and Other Stories, Six Trees, and The Givers.