A small doll-like woman, who never wished to grow old and yet came to resemble so many of her aging heroines, created in her fiction the heart of New England's life and ethos. Mary Wilkins Freeman created strong-willed characters, whose Yankee stoicism often led them into strange, single-minded paths of destructiveness or bizarre obsession. But she also analyzed her creations with loving kindness, supplying the leaven of humor and sympathy in works about family strife, delayed marriages, broken hearts, and small disappointments. In Pembroke (1894), as a father muses about his son, he conveys the painful differences between generations in New England villages: "There was no human being so strange and mysterious, such an unknown quantity, to Caleb Thayer as his own son. He had not one trait of character in common with him--at least, not one so translated into his own vernacular that he could comprehend it. It...