The Short Fiction of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah OrneJewett

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett

This volume brings together the works of two important American writers. Both Jewett and Freeman used as their settings the small towns of 19th-century New England, both created as their principal characters mature and elderly women. Their etched dramas of everyday existence and individual struggles for survival and fulfillment.

Genres: Anthologies, Short Stories

512 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1979

About the author

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71. Freeman's parents were orthodox Congregationalists, causing her to have a very strict childhood.

Religious constraints play a key role in some of her works. She later finished her education at West Brattleboro Seminary. She passed the greater part of her life in Massachusetts and Vermont.

Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). Her stories deal mostly with New England life and are among the best of their kind. Freeman is also remembered for her novel Pembroke (1894), and she contributed a notable chapter to the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908). In 1902 she married Doctor Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey.

In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen and was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is it that draws me to late 19th C female regionalist authors? Just read the Freeman here, as I've done the Jewett in the past. At first the stories seem to much the same, but after the half way point of the 14 stories here I started enjoying them again. She does pretty much have a format she plugs into, but what she does w/ it is still enjoyable. The men are 1 dimensional, but the women are just amazingly strong willed and independent. Ahh, the days when you could live on a garden and $100 a year! She should have listened to her own advice - made a bad marriage late in life to a younger man. Read these stories for the grandly independent women who are the major focus of every story.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised and delighted by these stories, mostly about older women, set in long-ago rural New England. I felt Jewett's story structure and tone was more modern -- less conventional -- than those of Freeman; but both dealt with appealingly unconventional lives, and convey the dignity, intelligence, and resilience of people who are often ignored, both in their culture and in ours.

[Angela Clayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great collection of stories in a New England setting. Very enjoyable.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories--and one novel--from two great writers from the late 1800's. Well worth reading.

[Sharon Healy-Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading a collection of short stories by 19th-century women, I was inspired to go back to scholarly writing. So, I decided to write on the female pastoral guide in The Country of the Pointed Firs. You may not be interested in my literary endeavors, but you will likely appreciate that, lit crit aside, The Country of the Pointed Firs is damned good reading. It beautifully captures the delicious escape and isolation from the driven, industrial world. You, yourself, can take a vacation with the narrator in a wonderfully crafted world where life moves slowly, competition and ambition have faded away, and people are bonded to nature and one another in a way that is soothing and calming. That's not to say the inhabitants haven't and don't still endure hardship; however, their bonds to one another and nature put that hardship in perspective. Like the narrator, you may find your own conscious expanded and your imagination freed from the binding of materialism, competition, and self-centeredness.

[Bethann Mccarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing I love about this book is the antiquity of coastal Maine, and the fact that the writing is current to the mode of living and attitudes. It's just so real, but the experiences of these people are so different from the way we live now. The characters and experiences are so real. The writing is excellent.