SOURCE: “About ‘Two Friends’ and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman,” in American Literary Realism, Vol. 21, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 43–57.

In the following excerpt, Koppelman draws parallels between Freeman's life and her uncollected story “Two Friends.”

“A young writer should follow the safe course of writing only about those subjects she knows thoroughly, and concerning which she trusts her own convictions.”

—Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Good Wits, Pen and Paper.”¹

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman wrote two stories which today we identify as lesbian stories: “Two Friends,” published in 1887, and “The Long Arm,” written in 1895.²

“Two Friends” is absent from checklists of her work, including the most recent one in Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Brent L. Kendrick.³ Poole's Index, the only periodical index for nineteenth-century U.S. periodical publications, excludes Harper's Bazaar. Although a few of her stories published in other periodicals were never collected, they...