1852–1930
Mary Eleanor Wilkins was born in Massachusetts. After winning a prize for her own writing as a teenager, she first wrote for children. Her first story for adults appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. Early in her life she lost both a sister and her parents, and throughout her adult writing she demonstrates a melancholy compassion for lost and hurt children. Her distaste for the suffocating strictures of religious doctrine can be traced to her own Congregationalist upbringing. Poverty throughout her childhood gave her intimate familiarity with the difficult lives of working-class Americans, lives that she would portray with great sympathy in her stories. Misfortune dogged her heels. She didn’t marry Charles Freeman until she was forty-nine, but afterward her alcoholic husband wound up in an institution.
Early in her life, she worked for decades as private secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and during her spare time she wrote. Gradually her writing attracted renown. “It is natural to suppose that any reader of current English literature would know Miss Wilkins,” proclaimed a magazine article at the dawn of the twentieth century. Although her star faded during the middle of the century, Freeman received distinguished admiration in her day. Mark Twain was a fan. When the American Academy of Arts and Letters created the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction, its first recipient was Freeman. In 1903 the book Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes nicely described her as “the most delicate and appreciative delineator of rural New England characters who has written within a generation.”
In Freeman’s fiction you will find no haunted mansions, no tormented aristocrats or monks. She wrote about ordinary people living ordinary lives, in which the supernatural sneaks up on them through everyday activities. In one story, “The Vacant Lot,” a woman goes out to hang laundry and finds the shadow of another woman hanging the shadows of laundry, but no one is there—only shadows. She wrote especially well, with sensitivity but not sentimentality, about the lives of women and children. She is best known for her stories of lost, abandoned, even spectral children—as in “The Wind in the Rose-Bush,” which is sweet and sad but somewhat predictable, and “The Lost Ghost.” She explored dreams, with powerful sexual subtexts beyond her era, in stories such as “The Hall Bedroom” and “A Symphony in Lavender.” Freeman was a disciple of the innovative mystery writer Anna Katharine Green, whose 1878 novel The Leavenworth Case was the first serious detective novel written by a woman. Freeman wrote to Green and emulated some of her techniques in stories such as “The Long Arm.” Her disarmingly casual story of a small-town psychic vampire, “Luella Miller,” appears in the Connoisseur’s Collection volume Dracula’s Guest.
No story of Freeman’s better demonstrates her masterful light touch, or her thoughtful exploration of gender and domesticity, than “The Southwest Chamber.” It appeared in 1903 as the fourth story of six in her collection The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural, a superb volume originally illustrated by the innovative Peter Newell, creator of The Hole Book.