SOURCE: “Must Age Equal Failure?: Sociology Looks at Mary Wilkins Freeman's Old Women,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 197–214.

In the following essay, Turkes uses Erik Erickson's psychological development model to evaluate various elderly female characters in Freeman's stories.

The revival of interest in the work of Mary Wilkins Freeman is generating some new and interesting criticism, but much exploration of her work remains shadowed by earlier critical dicta. Considering her a major American voice, her contemporary readers and both British and United States critics appreciated her humor—a favorite phrase used to describe her work noted her combination of “humor and pathos”—and saw as well her women protagonists, old and young, as well-drawn, individual characters. Awareness both of Freeman's humor and the importance and variety of her elderly women characters seems to be lost today.

In the early years of this century, critics and...