Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (October 31, 1852 – March 13, 1930) was a prominent 19th century American author. She was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71. She later finished her education at West Brattleboro Seminary. She passed the greater part of her life in Massachusetts and Vermont and for many years was the private secretary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. 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 and are among the best of their kind. Freeman is also remembered for her novel Pembroke (1894), and she contributed a notable chapter to the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908). In 1902 she married Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey.

In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen and was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.






Works:
• The Adventures of Ann (1886)
• A Humble Romance (1887)
• A New England Nun (1891)
• Young Lucretia (1892)
• Jane Field (1892)
• Giles Corey (1893)
• Pembroke (1894)
• Madelon (1896)
• Jerome, a Poor Man (1897)
• Silence, and other Stories (1898)
• The Love of Parson Lord (1900)
• The Portion of Labor (1901)
• Six Trees (1903)
• The Wind in the Rose Bush (1903)
• The Givers (1904)
• The Debtor (1905)
• Doc Gordon (1906)
• The Fair Lavinia, and Others (1907)
• The Winning Lady, and Others (1909)
• Butterfly House (1912)
• The Copy–Cat, and Other Stories (1914)
• Collected Ghost Stories (1974)
• Glasser, Leah Blatt. In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1996. [1]