Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (October 31, 1852 – March 13, 1930) was an American author. She is best known for her novel Pembroke, and also wrote a number of well-regarded ghost stories, which are still frequently anthologized.
Biography
Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts on October 31, 1852, to Eleanor Lothrop and Warren Edward Wilkins, who originally baptized her "Mary Ella". Her father was a descendant of Bray Wilkins. Freeman's parents were orthodox Congregationalists, and her upbringing was very strict. Religious constraints play a key role in some of her works.
In 1867, the family moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where Freeman graduated from the local high school before attending Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870 to 1871. She later finished her education at Glenwood Seminary in West Brattleboro. When the family's dry goods business in Vermont failed in 1873, the family returned to Randolph, Massachusetts. Freeman's mother died three years later, and she changed her middle name to "Eleanor" in her memory.
During a visit to Metuchen, New Jersey in 1892, she met Dr. Charles Manning Freeman, a non-practicing medical doctor seven years younger than she. After years of courtship and delays, the two were married on January 1, 1902. Immediately after, she firmly established her name as "Mary E. Wilkins Freeman", which she asked Harper's to use on all of her work.
As the years passed, the contrast between Mary and her sister, Anna, became apparent. While her sister Anna willingly undertook domestic work and increasingly met her parents' expectations, Mary quietly began to reject them. She would resist her mother's world of domesticity throughout her entire life. Her story, "The Revolt of Mother" is especially significant in this context, for the story seems to have been written as a tribute to her mother's work, a form of work she had never valued in her mother's lifetime. When the supernatural caught her interest, the result was a group of short stories which combined domestic realism with supernaturalism and these have proved very influential. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). Her stories deal mostly with New England life. Freeman is also remembered for her novel Pembroke (1894), and she contributed a notable chapter to the collaborative novel entitled The Whole Family (1908).
Through her different genres of work including children's stories, poems, and short stories, Mary Wilkins Freeman sought to demonstrate her values as a feminist. During the time which she was writing, she did this in nonconventional ways; for example, she diverged from making her female characters weak and in need of help which was a common trope in literature. Through characters such as Louisa in her short story: “A New England Nun,” Freeman challenges contemporary ideas concerning female roles, values, and relationships in society. Also, Freeman's short story “The Revolt of 'Mother'" illustrated the struggles of rural women and the role they played within their families. “The Revolt of 'Mother'” initiated the discussion on the rights of rural woman, went on to inspire many more pieces discussing the lack of control rural woman had over families finances, and looking to improve the structure of farm families in the early twentieth-century.
The one-act opera The Village Singer by Stephen Paulus was adapted from a Freeman short story; it was commissioned by Opera Theater of Saint Louis, and was premiered in 1979.
thumb|Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, 1900.|alt=|left
Although she produced a dozen volumes of short stories and as many novels, Freeman is remembered chiefly for the first two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and the novel Pembroke (1894) (Britannica Encyclopedia).