Freeman, Mrs. Mary Eleanor Wilkins
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
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.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's Encyclopedia in 1910 gave her birth year as 1862 and left her life open-ended; she was in fact born in Randolph, Massachusetts in 1852, and she died at Metuchen, New Jersey in 1930. The later years brought both trouble and honour: her marriage to Charles Manning Freeman collapsed over his drinking and they separated in 1922, while in 1926 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave her its William Dean Howells Medal for fiction and she was among the first women admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The 1910 judgment that she stood "in the front rank of American short story writers" did not hold for long — she was largely dropped from the canon by mid-century as "local colour" fell out of fashion — but feminist scholars from the 1970s onward restored her, and "A New England Nun" and "The Revolt of 'Mother'" are now standard classroom texts. Her supernatural tales, collected in The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903) and unmentioned here, are also read again as some of the best American ghost stories.
Written for this edition, 2026.