Born in 1852, Mary Wilkins Freeman spent the first fifty years of her life in the rural villages of New England. It was an area suffering severe economic depression. The combination of fatalities from the Civil War (1861-65), westward expansion, and industrialization in the cities had taken large numbers of young men from the countryside. What remained was a population largely female, elderly, or both, struggling to earn a living and to keep up appearances. Freeman became famous for her unsentimental and realistic portrayals of these people in her short stories. She wrote, "A young writer should follow the safe course of writing only about those subjects she knows thoroughly." This is exactly what she did, exploring the often peculiar and nearly always strong-willed New England temperament in short stories, poems, novels, and plays.,/p>

Freeman is best known for her short stories. She began writing short...