The life of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman has too often been compared to that of the spinsters who populate much of her fiction. Although she lived most of her life in small New England villages and did not marry until she was forty-nine years of age, Freeman's life was far less isolated and her work far more diverse than many readers realize. Freeman was born in a cultural moment in which Puritanism, Transcendentalism, and Abolitionism and the health and purity movements were influential trends. She lived out the last decade of her life during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, an era in which indulgence in spiritual and political fulfillment took a backseat to commercial gratification in the last gasp of economic growth prior to the stock market crash of 1929, an event that preceded Freeman's death by a year.

Between these decades, Freeman saw vast changes occurring in...