Other short stories of note by Mary Wilkins Freeman include "Sister Liddy," a story about women living in the poorhouse, "A Conflict Ended," in which a stubborn parishioner refuses to enter the church, sitting on the steps instead, because he disagrees with the hiring of the new minister.

Kate Chopin's short novel The Awakening (1899) chronicles the story of a young mother in Louisiana who leaves her husband and children in search of her own identity and later commits suicide. Like Freeman, Chopin has caught the attention of feminist critics and historians for her depiction of women's lives at the end of the last century.

Carolyn Chute's novel The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) is an example of a recent work that continues the local color realist tradition. It tells of the poor and eccentric inhabitants of a small rural town in...