Born Mary Eleanor Wilkins in Randolph, MA, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is a writer best known for her concern with the often isolated lives of women in New England villages at an historical moment in which modern, industrialized society is washing away the rural, small town character of New England life. Her prose marks an adaptation of the concerns of regionalism within a realist frame, a key element of which is a concern for the psychology and choices of central characters.
At 15, Mary moved with her family from Massachusetts to Brattlebro, VT, where her father went into the dry goods business. After finishing high school, Mary was enrolled in Mount Holyoak Female Seminary, but this only lasted a year, as she found the experience a terribly strict and confining one. She returned to Brattlebro to attend a local seminary and teach in a local girl’s school in order to help support the family after the failure of her father’s business. The teaching did not last long, however, as the school, too, soon failed. In the wake of this, Mary took up writing as an occupation, publishing her first pieces, poetry for children, in children’s magazines. In the late 70s and early 80s, the income writing could bring in, scant as it was, became all the more necessary, as first her sister, then her mother, and then her father died, leaving Mary, by the time she was 30, to fend for herself. She moved back to Randolph, MA and lived with girlhood friends as she continued to write for wide-circulation magazines. She established her popularity and reputation with collections of short stories in the late 80s and early 90s, A Humble Romance and Other Stories in 1887 and A New England Nun and Other Stories in 1891, from which our selections, “A New England Nun” and “The Revolt of Mother” are taken.
Freeman, whose last name comes from a man she married at 50 years old, many years after she established her reputation as Mary E. Wilkins, was recognized, especially early in her career, as a writer of regional or local color tales, with the specific setting of the New England village. “In a letter to fellow regionalist writer Hamlin Garland , she wrote, ‘I am writing about the New England of the present day, and the dialect is that which is daily in my ears. I have however a fancy that my characters belong to a present that is rapidly becoming past, and that a few generations will cause them to disappear.’ ” (Diggs et al.). She wrote this letter, I believe, prior to the publication of the stories we are reading. If there is an emphasis at all on dialect, it is a subtle one, especially in comparison to the representations of speech we have seen in other texts we have read. There’s a case to be made for the general subtly of the regional flavor in these stories and the degree to which they evince a more generally realist approach. Perhaps we’ll discuss that?
REFERENCE
“Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.
Diggs, Marylynne, with the assistance of Heidi L. M. Jacobs Editorial Assistant, and and Jennifer Putzi Editorial Assistant. “Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.” American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920. Ed. Sharon M. Harris, Heidi L. M. Jacobs, and Jennifer Putzi. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 221. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.