SOURCE: “The ‘Faces of Children That Had Never Been’: Ghost Stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman,” in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, 1991, pp. 41–63.

In the excerpt below, Fisken considers Freeman's ghost stories, particularly those featuring a lost girl, which she suggests may represent Freeman's ambivalence about her own choice to suppress her nurturing impulses—marriage and family—in favor of an artistic career.

On August 12, 1889, after Sarah Orne Jewett wrote to Mary Wilkins¹ praising “A Gentle Ghost,” her earliest printed ghost story, Wilkins made two different responses to that praise in a single day. To her friend, Kate Upson Clark, she wrote dismissively: “I do not care much about that story, and do not approve of this mystical vein I am apt to slide into if I don't take care” (Infant Sphinx, 96), while...