SOURCE: “Another Mary Wilkins Freeman: Understudies and Six Trees,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, June, 1995, pp. 89–101.

In the following essay, Marchalonis focuses on the stories in Understudies and Six Trees, maintaining that Freeman employed an “Other” from the natural world—a tree or an animal—against which she measured the human characters.

Readers and admirers of Mary Wilkins Freeman know her chiefly as the writer of what is often described as classic Freeman: short, sharp examinations of village life and the quirks and conflicts of the human beings who live in her microcosms. These tales are available in three modern collections (Clark, Pryse, Solomon), which, with a few exceptions, reprint stories from her first two books, A Humble Romance (1883) and A New England Nun (1887). These collections present the writing that seems to be typical Freeman and that she does superbly well. Not only do most readers know...