‘THE COPY-CAT’ BY MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

This story started from the old relationship between two families, the Jennings and Wheeler’s family. The issue arouse when the women of both families tried to compare their own child, who were both females, one named Lily Jennings and the other named Amelia Wheeler, who was also called “The Copy-Cat” by the pupils of Madame’s school. These girls were from quite wealthy families, but the problem was the way they were dressed, their appearances, not just to school, but also at home or going out to play. They were quite close to each other. But Lily was known to be prettier, neat, and fashionable and her hair was beautifully decorated with cute ribbons. On the other hand, Amelia was acknowledging as the girl who was odd, plain-looking and unconsciously adored Lily. She was unpurposely copying almost every single movement, the way to talk, to walk or even to sing from Lily. That is why the girl is called “The Copy-Cat.” Even among the female teachers, they noticed about the drastic changes in Amelia’s behaviour. They even had a small talk about the girls and love to compare her with Lily.

Lily always appeared as the girl who was adorable, sweet and delicate. And Amelia was simply judged among the teachers and students as the strange girl and looks pale. But things started to go even wild when Lily accidentally heard the boys of her class planning about to have their own first campfire and she then decided to join them, but unnoticed. She does not want her mother to know her naughty plan that is to switch place with Amelia’s bedroom once she got back from those boys’ camp spot. Amelia had to agree with her plans. Lily threatened her with their friendship. She had it all planned carefully so that she never will be caught. But then, she got caught by Amelia’s mother and grandmothers. She miscalculate the time she got back to Amelia’s bed and was brought back to her house by the Wheelers and forced to admit in front of her mother, Mrs. Jennings. She told them every word. It was the best turning point in Amelia’s life later on. She had the most attention from her mother and got the chance to wear the best outfit then. She then perceived her own individuality, and not being called “the Copy-Cat” anymore.

‘BOYS AND GIRLS’ BY ALICE MUNRO

‘‘Boys and Girls’’ opens with the unnamed narrator describing her father and his work. He is a fox farmer who raises silver foxes which are skinned so that their fur can be sold to fur traders. The narrator, a girl at the time the story takes place, and her smaller brother Laird, enjoy watching their father doing skinning work, which he does in the cellar of their house each fall or early winter when the foxes’ coats are prime. The girl also describes her father’s farm hand, Henry Bailey.
She tells how in bed at the end of the day she can still dreaming of becoming the hero in her own tales, rescuing people, lots of adventures and even included her brother Laird in the story. The narrator is a young girl who appreciates respects and holds her father’s authority in high regard, while she looks down on her mother’s weakness. This weakness stems from the fact that her father dominates her mother. Her views toward her mother’s femininity stem from her own insecurities about becoming a woman, and thus they tend to be indifferent in nature. She does not think that women are bad people, but does think that they have ulterior intentions.
The girl seems to compare the gender role between the father and the mother herself. This foreshadows the coming event in her life. The main character/narrator disobeys her father without her father knowing. She does this because she is starting to become her own person. Her maturity and capability to make her own decisions are pointed out distinctively as the story develops. Therefore she continued to do little things against the beliefs of her family, because as she said, "I kept myself free." She loves to dressed like a boy, and behave like a tomboy until her grandmother came and nagged to her things that a girl should do, that she should not suppose to do. “Girls don’t slam doors like that.” “Girls keep their knees together when they sit down.” She was an outcast from the rest of her family, due to the fact that she did not act like a girl as her grandmother continued to try and point out to her. The girl is unsure about whether she wants to be a woman or not, because she enjoys her father's work and wants to be a part of it.
At the end of this story we witnessed the young girls determination and strength prevail as she began to think for herself and even attempted to set her own spirit free. A symbol of the young girl’s courage to resist pressures from society resembled that of Flora’s, a mare who had managed to escape from the stable, and was “running free in the barnyard…” When the girl’s father instructed her to “Go shut the Gate!” She merely “opened it as wide” as she could. She had never disobeyed him before and could not understand why she had done it, as she knew that, “Flora would not really get away”. The inevitable fate of the young girl was just like that of Flora’s. One could even say that Flora was the young girls spirit and when they “cut her up in fifty pieces”; they did the same to the heart and soul of the young girl. At the end of the day she was, “only a girl”.

‘A WHITE HERON’ BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT

Nine-year-old Sylvia has come from the city to live in the New England woods with her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley. As the story begins, Sylvia has been living with her grandmother for nearly a year, learning to adapt to country ways. She helps the old woman by taking over some of the more physical chores, such as finding Miss Mooly, the cow, each evening in the fields where she grazes and bringing her home. By means of this and other tasks, along with her explorations in the forest, Sylvia has become a country girl who dearly loves her new home. She has taken to it easily and immerses herself in her new life completely, as evidenced by the description of her journey home each evening with the cow: “..but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not.”

One evening she is approached by a hunter, who is in the area looking for birds to shoot and preserve for his collection. This young man is searching in particular for the rare white heron and he is sure that it makes its nest in the vicinity. He accompanies Sylvia on her way with hopes of spending the night at her grandmother’s house. Once he has received this invitation, he makes himself at home, and after they eat, he says that he will give a sum of money to anyone who can lead him to the white heron. The next day Sylvia accompanies the hunter into the forest as he searches for the bird’s nest, but he does not find it. Early the following morning, the girl decides to go out and look for the bird by herself so that she can be sure of showing the hunter its exact location when he awakes. She decides to climb the tallest tree in the forest so that she can see the entire countryside, and she finds the heron, just as she had thought she would. But Sylvia is so affected by her tree-top observation of the heron and other wildlife that she cannot bring herself to disclose the heron's location to the hunter after all, despite his entreaties. Sylvia knows that she would be awarded much-needed money for directing him to the heron, but she decides that she can not play any part in bringing about the bird's death. The hunter eventually departs without his prize. As Sylvia grows older she is haunted by the idea of what she gave up that day, and in the last paragraph of the story, Jewett, as omniscient observer, urges nature to reward her for her selflessness by offering her its secrets.

Elia W. Peattie

Elia Wilkinson was the daughter of Frederick and Amanda (Cahill) Wilkinson. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan on January 15, 1862 but moved with her family to Chicago when she was young. She stopped attending school when she was fourteen, but kept up a reading habit. In 1883 she married Robert Burns Peattie, a Chicago journalist. She began writing short stories for newspapers, and became a reporter with the Chicago Tribune and subsequently the Chicago Daily News. In 1889 she moved to Omaha, becoming chief editorial writer on the Omaha World-Herald. She wrote for magazines including Century, Lippincott's Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, St. Nicholas, Wide Awake, The American, America, Harper's Weekly, and San Francisco Argonaut.


In 1888, she was commissioned by Chicago publishers to write a young people's history of the United States, and wrote the seven-hundred pages The Story of America in four months. Her novel The Judge won a $900 prize from the Detroit Free Press in 1889, and was subsequently published in book form. Later in 1889 the Northern Pacific Railroad employed her to visit and report on Alaska: A Trip through Wonderland became a popular guide-book. With Scrip and Staff (1891) was a story of the children's crusade.


Peattie subsequently returned to Chicago and became literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. Peattie was a prolific writer and produced hundreds of short stories and essays. Her works include Lotta Embury's Career (1915), The Newcomers (1916), Sarah Brewster's Relations (1916), Memory's Painted Windows (1919), The Wander Weed (1923) and Songs from a Southern Garden (1923). She died on July 12, 1935 in Wallingford, Vermont, USA.

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]

Sarah Orne Jewett

Known primarily as a regional writer, Sarah Orne Jewett spent most of her life on the rugged Maine coast that is the setting for much of her work. She was born in South Berwick, Maine, on September 3 1849, one of three daughters of an old and prosperous New England family. Both of her parents were readers, and they wanted their daughters to be well educated— somewhat uncommon in the nineteenth century. For a time, Jewett even considered becoming a physician like her father; however, poor health made it impossible for her to complete rigorous medical training. Instead, she turned to her talent for writing.
Jewett often accompanied her father on his rounds and loved to hear him talk about books and ideas. At age eighteen she published her first short story, a melodramatic tale of love. This early success led to what would be her true calling: writing honestly and simply about the richness and poignancy of the common folk of Maine. From the beginning, her focus was on lonely, misunderstood people, particularly women, and their relationships; her stories often have little in the way of exciting or dramatic plot and action but are nonetheless powerfully moving.
In 1878 Jewett’s father died, and Jewett was left without her dearest friend, whom she later described in the novel A Country Doctor (1884). Shortly after her father’s death she began an intimate and lifelong relationship with Annie Fields, the wife of publisher James T. Fields. Through the Fieldses, Jewett became acquainted with many of the most noted writers of the day, including Celia Thaxter, George Eliot, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne. After James Fields’s death, Jewett and Annie became closer, forming what was known as a ‘‘Boston marriage;’’ they did not always share a home, but they were treated as a couple by their friends.
Jewett continued writing, attracting a larger audience as her stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s magazines. ‘‘A White Heron,’’ rejected by the Atlantic Monthly as too sentimental, was published first in Jewett’s collection A White Heron and Other Stories. She wrote novels in addition to short stories but they were not as successful, with the exception of her greatest work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a series of sketches about the residents of a fictional coastal village. This novel solidified her reputation as one of the century’s greatest regional writers.
Jewett gave up writing after a 1902 carriage accident left her in disabling pain. She had published more than 150 stories and four novels. She devoted her remaining years to Annie Fields and other friends, including the young writer Willa Cather. Cather credited Jewett with influencing her to write about her home, Nebraska. Cather’s first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! (1913), was dedicated to Jewett, who had died in South Berwick on June 24, 1909.

The Authors from my Research Paper

I just wanted to introduced my choices of authors from the research paper that I'm conducting. Still got 85% more to go.

Canadian short story writer and novelist, often characterized as a Canadian Chekhov, although her characters are not Chekhovian in the sense that they were passive and powerless to change their lives. Munro describes sensitively the lifestyles, customs, and values of ordinary people, often revealing in the process hidden meanings and personal tragedies. Although Munro's stories deal with the lives of women, her stance is not explicitly feminist. Munro has been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around." (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001)

Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario, where she grew up on a farm with her sister and brother. Before taking up farming, Munro's father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, had raised foxes and minks and worked as a watch-man. Anne Clarke Laidlaw, Munro's mother, had been a teacher. She suffered from Parkinson's disease and died in 1959.

Munro was expected to continue the farming business, but when she was 12, she decided to become a writer - "my oddity just shone out of me;" she once said. At the age of eighteen, Munro won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario. In 1951 she married a fellow student, James Munro, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. In the early 1960s, the family moved to Victoria, where Munro founded with her husband a successful bookstore.

Munro's first story, 'The Dimensions of a Shadow', appeared in 1950, but it was no until 1968, that her first collection of short stories was published. "I never intended to be a short-story writer," Munro once said. The book, Dance of the Happy Shades, was awarded Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award. Several of the stories had earlier been published in periodicals and drew on Munro's own childhood experience. "The short story is alive and well in Canada," wrote Martin Levin in The New York Times (September 23, 1973), "where most of the 15 tales originate like a fresh winds from the North."

"The street is shaded, is some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards. People are sitting out, men in shirt-sleeves and undershirts and women in aprons - not people we know but if anybody looks ready to nod and say, "Warm night," my father will nod and say something the same." (from 'Walker Brothers Cowboy', in Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968)

Munro's second book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), was a cycle of interlocked stories about the childhood of a young woman, who wants to become a writer. Her portrait of the artist as a young girl gained international attention and was also made into a television movie, starring Munro's daughter Jenny.

Munro marriage broke down in 1972. She returned to southern Ontario, and married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer, whom she had known as a student. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You from 1974 collected together pieces published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Viva and Redbook. The author was first unhappy with the book, and pulled it from the presses for restructuring. In Britain the work was published as a novel. Munro's third collection, however, contains some of her finest stories, including 'Wild Swans', 'Mischief' and 'Simon's Luck.' Also in Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), which followed the lives of two women, Rose and Flo, her stepmother, the tales were interlinked. Rose leaves the small town of Hanratty in Ontario, marries well, and becomes a successful television actress, but eventually she returns to take care of Flo, who has always been comfortable with her place in the world.

From the beginning, Munro has been true to her own literary style and voice. Generally her stories are set in small towns in southern Ontario and British Columbia. Her style has been described as beautifully transparent; it is unsentimental and detailed as in a photograph, much is left unsaid, but at the same time the undercurrents are oddly poignant and disturbing. The past is always present in the here and now. As a rule, Munro's characters are people we meet every day, but their choices are not obvious. Sometimes a small incident changes the course of their lives, gives it a new perspective, or provides a key piece to the story. "The complexity of things -- the things within things -- just seems to be endless," Munro has said. "I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."

Munro has received the Governor General's Award for Fiction three times. The short film adaptation of her story 'Boys and Girls' won an Oscar in 1984. Munro received in 1990 the Canada Council Molson Prize for lifetime contributions to her country's cultural life.

Selected works:

• Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968
• Lives of Girls and Women, 1971
• Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, 1974
• Who Do You Think You Are?, 1978 (UK and US The Beggar Maid) - Kerjäläistyttö (suom. Kristiina Rikman)
• The Moons of Jupiter, 1982
• The Progress of Love, 1986 - Valkoinen tunkio (suom. Kristiina Rikman)
• Friend of My Youth, 1990
• Open Secrets, 1994 - Julkisia salaisuuksia (suom. Kristiina Rikman)
• Selected Stories, 1996
• The Love of a Good Woman, 1998
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001 - Viha, ystävyys, rakkaus (suom. Kristiina Rikman)
• Vintage Munro, 2004
• Runaway, 2004 - Karkulainen (suom. Kristiina Rikman)
• The View from the Castle Rock, 2006 - Sanansaattaja (suom. Kristiina Rikman)