Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born
in Randolph, Massachusetts, one of two children,
both daughters, of Warren Wilkins and Eleanor
Lothrop Wilkins. In 1867, as the family's economic
situation worsened, they moved to Brattleboro,
Vermont, where Freeman attended high school. After
only a year at Mount Holyoke, Freeman returned
to Brattleboro in 1870, where she briefly taught
school, but she generally was not able to help
the family's financial state. During these years
the family came close to extreme poverty so that
all of her life, Freeman would prize the security
of a financially stable home. In the early 1880s,
Freeman, writing as Mary E. Wilkins, began creating
works for children's magazines.
The deaths of her sister, mother, and father between
1876 and 1883 left her completely without family,
but this change led her to a new life as a 
productive
writer. Moving back to Randolph, she was offered
several rooms of her own in the home of a childhood
friend, Mary Wales, who provided freedom from
financial worries and management of her career.
In the 1880s her stories, particularly those depicting
the interior conflicts of ordinary New England
women, were very well received. Two collections,
A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and
A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), which
contained "Louisa," brought her wide acclaim as
a realist whose style was admired for its directness,
simplicity, and forcefulness.
In 1902, when she was close to 50
years old, Mary E. Wilkins married Dr. Charles
Freeman after a ten-year, and on her part often
reluctant, romance. She had begun to write novels
in the 1890s, and while these did not meet with
the same success as her stories, she continued
to be praised for her insightful depictions of
New England characters and settings. Her marriage
brought only brief happiness. By 1918 Charles
Freeman had become addicted to alcohol and drugs.
In 1920 Mary Freeman had him committed to a state
hospital. By 1922 she was legally separated from
him. Returning to Randolph from the home she and
her husband had built in Metuchen, New Jersey,
Freeman continued to write. In 1926 she received
the William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Fiction
and was inducted into the National Institute of
Arts and Letters. She died of a heart attack in
1930. Her reputation had declined in the 1920s,
yet today she is widely admired as an innovative
writer, particularly for her insightful psychological
treatment of women's lives. Freeman was a prolific
writer, completing twenty-two volumes of short
stories, fourteen novels, three plays, three books
of poetry, and eight collections for children.
-L.H.M.
Photograph courtesy of Brown
Brothers
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