SOURCE: “New England Gothic by the Light of Common Day: Lizzie Borden and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's ‘The Long Arm,’” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, June, 1997, pp. 211–36.

In the following essay, Shaw describes how Freeman utilized the conventions of mystery and detective fiction as well as elements of the infamous Lizzie Borden murder case in “The Long Arm.”

When Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 1895 prize-winning detective story, “The Long Arm,” first appeared in newspapers across the country, she had begun to make decisions about her professional writing that complicated both her career and her later critical reception. After firmly establishing her reputation as a leading regional realist with the periodical short fiction collected in A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891), she began to experiment with a range of genres in the mid-nineties that ultimately led her to produce over forty volumes of poetry, drama, and fiction...