Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

-1930
 
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, one of two children,
both daughters, of Warren Wilkins and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins. In 1867, as the family's
economic situation worsened, they moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where Freeman
attended high school.

After only a year at Mount Holyoke, Freeman returned to
Brattleboro in 1870, where she briefly taught school, but she generally was not able to
help the family's financial state. During these years the family came close to extreme
poverty so that all of her life, Freeman would prize the security of a financially stable
home. In the early 1880s, Freeman, writing as Mary E. Wilkins, began creating works for
children's magazines.

The deaths of her sister, mother, and father between 1876 and 1883 left her completely
without family, but this change led her to a new life as a productive writer. Moving back to Randolph, she was offered several rooms of her own in the home of a childhood friend,Mary Wales, who provided freedom from
financial worries and management of hercareer.

In the 1880s her stories, particularlythose depicting the interior conflicts ofordinary New England women, were verywell received. Two collections, A HumbleRomance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), which contained "Louisa," brought her wide acclaim as a realist whose style was admired for its directness, simplicity, and forcefulness.

In 1902, when she was close to 50 years old, Mary E. Wilkins married Dr. Charles Freeman after a ten-year, and on her part often reluctant, romance. She had begun to write novels in the 1890s, and while these
did not meet with the same success as her stories, she continued to be praised for her insightful depictions of New England characters and settings. Her marriage brought only brief happiness. By 1918 Charles Freeman had become addicted to alcohol and drugs. In 1920 Mary Freeman had him committed to a state hospital. By 1922 she was legally separated from him.

Returning to Randolph from the home she and her husband had built in Metuchen, New Jersey,
Freeman continued to write. In 1926 she received the William Dean Howells Gold Medal
for Fiction and was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She died of a
heart attack in 1930. Her reputation had declined in the 1920s, yet today she is widely
admired as an innovative writer, particularly for her insightful psychological treatment of
women's lives. Freeman was a prolific writer, completing twenty-two volumes of short
stories, fourteen novels, three plays, three books of poetry, and eight collections for
children. ­L.H.M.