Fiction by Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

A New England Sampler

Thomas A. Maik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317944607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In an era following the Civil War which saw change and transformation everywhere, new magazines emerged to record and report the change. Responding to the call for material to fill their pages, writers in regions such as New England, the West, and the South answered, most often with short stories. In fact, short fiction became the literature of choice for an emerging mass audience. And increasingly the voices of women writers found resonance in the pages of Harper's New Monthly, Putnam's, and Galaxy, to name a few of the newly established magazines. In New England, writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Johnson Prichard, and Rose Terry Cooke found a voice within the pages of these magazines. Although read widely in the late nineteenth century, increasingly these women writers-with a few exceptions-began to be marginalized early-on in the twentieth century. Besides expanding the canon, this collection of selected short stories by these seven New England writers attempts to restore what has been for many of them in this century either a diminished or even a lost voice.

Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)

Mary Ella Wilkins Freeman, the older of two daughters, was born to Warren E. and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins on October 31, 1852, in Randolph, Massachusetts. In many ways Randolph, serves as a model of what was happening in New England communities throughout the later nineteenth century and is reflected in the writers’ fiction. A typical New England manufacturing community, Randolph was noted in the 1850s for its shoe exports to Australia. With the outbreak of the Civil War in the 1860s, the town faced hard times, and Freeman’s family did what numerous other New England families did during these decades: they moved. In 1867, when Freeman was fifteen, the family relocated to Brattleboro, Vermont, and Freeman’s father, who had been a carpenter in Randolph, now opened a mercantile business in Brattleboro. Again, Freeman’s family experience mirrors what was happening in so many other households in New England during the Brattleboro years. Her father’s business failed, and the family was forced to move in with the Reverend Thomas Pickman Tyler household, where Freeman’s mother became the live-in housekeeper.

In 1870, Freeman graduated from Brattleboro High School. She then spent one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the same school that Emily Dickinson briefly attended. Used to close ties with friends from Randolph and Brattleboro as well as with her sister and mother and her mother’s extended family, Freeman experienced major losses even before she began to write. Evelyn Sawyer, her close friend in Brattleboro, married and moved away. Freeman’s sister died in 1876 when Freeman was twenty four, her mother died in 1880 when Mary was twenty eight, and her father died three years later in 1883. In addition to these personal losses within a short period of time, Freeman’s unreciprocated love for Reverend Tyler’s son left her distraught. In a tribute after her mother died, Freeman adopted her mother’s name, Eleanor, as her middle name.

Too late to benefit the family economically, Freeman published her first significant fiction in Harper’s Bazaar shortly before her father’s death. In 1884, after the loss of three family members, Freeman returned to Randolph, Massachusetts, to live with her very good friend from her Randolph school days, Mary Wales, and her family. Freeman’s life at this point reflects the lives of other New England women who establish close friendships and bonds with other women. In this collection of writers, for example, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s very close association with a circle of female friends began after her husband’s death in 1888 and continued until her own death in 1921. Similarly, in the early 1880s when James T. Fields, the Boston publisher and husband of Annie Fields, died, Annie Fields established what became known as a “Boston marriage” with Sarah Orne Jewett, a relationship that continued until Jewett’s death in 1909. In Freeman’s own case, the relationship with her good friend, Mary Wales, lasted for more than fifteen years.

After an acquaintanceship lasting a decade, including a three-year vacillation on the question of marriage, in 1902 Freeman, at the age of forty-nine, married Charles Manning Freeman, a Columbia University medical doctor. In the early years, the marriage appears to have been a good one; however, by 1909 alcohol problems began to plague Charles Freeman. Although Charles had been treated for his drinking problems during 1909, by 1919 the situation had deteriorated to the point where Mary Wilkins committed her husband to the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane to be treated for alcoholism. Freeman obtained a formal separation from him before his death in 1923. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven on March 13, 1930, in Metuchen, New Jersey, where she had settled after her marriage.

Freeman rejected a career in teaching to focus on her goal to become a writer, and from her first significant publication in Harper’s Bazaar shortly before her father’s death in 1883, she enjoyed a literary career which spanned nearly fifty years. In that period of time she wrote fifteen collections of short stories, sixteen novels, one play, and eight volumes of prose and poetry for children. Of the various genres she attempted, her best writing appeared in her short stories during the decades of the 1880s and 1890s.

In her fiction from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Freeman writes about the rural New England mill towns and villages that are comparable to the town she grew up in: Randolph, Massachusetts. Randolph, a typical New England community fourteen miles from Boston, gave Freeman her sense of locale: harsh winters, raw springs, the community church, the school. Randolph also provided her a sense of community: strong bonds between women, homogeneity, hardship, the eccentricities and oddities of human character. In her fiction, Freeman depicts the common and ordinary experiences in the lives of men and women of the New England region she knew intimately. Although the lives, events, and situations of her fiction appear as being typical, Freeman transcends them to show the universal truths of human character and daily living. Perry Westbrook, one of her biographers, observes the accuracy of Freeman’s depiction of New England life. “In several volumes of short stories and three or four novels, she has caught the flavor of that life as no other author has.” (Mary Wilkins Freeman. [New York: Twayne, 1967], p. 15).

Without question, Freeman captures the essence of place. And long before terms such as “feminism” and “liberation” became part of our culture through consciousness-raising in the 1960s and ‘70s, Freeman concerned herself with the status and role of women. In her fiction we find portrayals of strong, defiant, and rather unconventional women. On the one hand, she creates independent women as central characters who challenge the traditional sex roles prescribed by their culture. On the other hand, narrators of the stories, and sometimes minor figures in the stories, display ambivalence toward the very roles portrayed by the central characters. Often, in fact, the narrators seem to prefer that the females follow more conventional behavior. As a result, we have a dichotomy between the characters’ and narrators’ attitudes toward conventional sex roles.

In the three stories included in this collection, the central characters reflect quintessential New England characteristics: determination, independence, strength of conviction, and courage in the face of overwhelming opposition. Published first in the October 1884 issue of Harper’s New Monthly magazine, “A Gatherer of Simples” centers around Aurelia Flower, a woman described as “strongly built” with a complexion of a “hard red tinge” from exposure to sun and wind. In many ways the story suggests the perversion of New England values. Aurelia grows up in a home that offers little love. Instead of celebrating a strong mother-daughter relationship, Freeman in this story depicts a mother who is “hard” and “silent,” a woman who emphasizes work and is successful but finds no satisfaction in her success. Instead of a strong, supportive father, Freeman depicts an insecure and weak man who Aurelia remembers as being “gloomy,” “melancholy,” and “hard-working,” a person who commits suicide in her childhood. Out of what could be considered a dysfunctional family background comes a study of a survivor in the character of Aurelia. Turning from the loneliness and despair that she knows only too well in the human world, Aurelia finds comfort through nature as an herbalist. However, only when given the opportunity to raise a small child does she realize the extent of the emptiness in her life. Through the young child, Aurelia is given the opportunity to break the bonds of despair, loneliness, and isolation and is given a second chance at the love and relationship denied in her own childhood.

Duty, family status, class and social distinctions, thwarted young love, independence, isolation, and obsession are some of the ideas central to “Evelina’s Garden,” a story Freeman first published in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in June 1896. Evelina, the central character, comes from the community’s most prominent family. Although she is attracted to Thomas Merriam, her sense of status and “maidenly decorum” prevents her from acting on those feelings. As a result, Thomas marries someone else and Evelina turns away from the community to become excessively reclusive. Over the remaining years of a long life, Evelina’s passion becomes her garden. The results of isolation and obsession become even more apparent at her death when she wills her cousin, also named Evelina, what amounts to a substantial fortune, with the condition that she remain single and devote her life to caring for the garden. Although the surviving Evelina has strong feelings for and intends to marry Thomas Merriam’s son, the village minister, he breaks off the relationship with Evelina out of a sense of duty. Only when Evelina demonstrates courageous independence and “kills” the garden by pouring hot water and salt over the plants does she break the bonds of isolation and obsession of past generations. Ideas in this story remind one of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Hawthorne where he deals with isolation, thwarted love, and perversion of values.

“The Revolt of Sophia Lane,” the final story in this collection was published by Freeman in the December 1903 issue of Harper’s New Monthly. In certain respects, Sophia, the central character reminds us of Mother in another “revolt” story by Freeman: “The Revolt of Mother.” Like Mother, Sophia is strong willed, determined, and independent. Like Mother’s strong and nurturing relationship with her daughter, Sophia has a similar relationship with her niece. Although Mother and Sophia in the two stories supposedly have the best intentions and best interests at heart, in many ways, they could be viewed as controlling, domineering, and “smothering” in their relationships with the younger females. “The Revolt of Sophia Lane” is a lighter story compared with the other two stories by Freeman in this collection. In Freeman’s use of humor in “The Revolt of Sophia Lane,” one see another connection with “The Revolt of Mother.” In their defiance of community values as well as in their independence and determination, the actions by both Mother in “The Revolt of Mother” and Sophia in “The Revolt of Sophia Lane” appear extreme and even comical. Although comic as she loads the sleigh in bitter December weather and returns Christmas gifts because of their impracticality even before the holiday, Sophia’s action is disarmingly blunt, and she does make her point. Freeman knows well and shares with her audience the idiosyncrasies of New England life and characters.

Selected Primary Works

A Humble Romance, and Other Stories, 1887; A New England Nun, and Other Stories, 1891; Pembroke, 1894; The People of Our Neighborhood, 1898; Silence, and Other Stories, 1898; By the Light of the Soul, 1906; Edgewater People, 1918.

“A Gatherer of Simples”

Harper’s New Monthly, October 1884

A damp air was blowing up, and the frogs were beginning to peep. The sun was setting in a low red sky. On both sides of the road were rich green meadows intersected by little canal-like brooks. Beyond the meadows on the west was a distant stretch of pine woods, that showed dark against the clear sky. Aurelia Flower was going along the road toward her home, with a great sheaf of leaves and flowers in her arms. There were the rosy spikes of hardhack; the great white corymbs of thoroughwort, and the long blue racemes of lobelia. Then there were great bunches of the odorous tansy and pennyroyal in with the rest.

Aurelia was a tall, strongly built woman: she was not much over thirty, but she looked older. Her complexion had a hard red tinge from exposure to sun and wind, and showed seams as unreservedly as granite. Her face was thin, and her cheek-bones high. She had a profusion of auburn hair, showing in a loose slipping coil, beneath her limp black straw hat. Her dress, as a matter of fashion, was execrable; in point of harmony with her immediate surroundings, very well, though she had not thought of it in that way. There was a green under-skirt, and a brown over-skirt and basque of an obsolete cut. She had worn it for a good many years just so, and never thought of altering it. It did not seem to occur to her that though her name was Flower, she was not really a flower in regard to apparel, and had not its right of unchangeableness in the spring. When the trees hung out their catkins, she flaunted her poor old greens and browns under them, rejoicing, and never dreamed but what they looked all right. As far as dress went, Aurelia was a happy woman. She went along the road to-night at a good pace, her armful of leaves and blossoms nodding; her spare muscular limbs bore her along easily. She had been over a good many miles since noon, but she never thought of being tired.

Presently she came in sight of her home, a square unpainted building, black with age. It stood back a little from the road on a gentle slope. There were three great maple trees in front of the house; their branches rustled against the roof. On the left was a small garden; some tall poles thickly twined with hops were prominent in it.

Aurelia went round to the side door of the house with her armful of green things. The door opened directly into the great kitchen. One on entering would have started back as one would on seeing unexpected company in a room. The walls were as green as a lady’s bower with bunches and festoons of all sorts of New England herbs. There they hung, their brave blossoms turning gray and black, giving out strange half-pleasant, half-disgusting odors. Aurelia took them in like her native air. “It’s good to get home,” murmured she to herself, for there was no one else; she lived alone.

She took off her hat and disposed of her burden; then she got herself some supper. She did not build a fire in the cooking stove, for she never drank tea in warm weather. Instead, she had a tumbler of root-beer which she had made herself. She set it out on one end of her kitchen table with a slice of coarse bread and a saucer of cold beans. She sat down to it and ate with a good appetite. She looked better with her hat off. Her forehead was an important part of her face; it was white and womanly, and her reddish hair lay round it in pretty curves; then her brown eyes, under very strongly arched brows, showed to better advantage. Taken by herself, and not compared with other women, Aurelia was not so bad-looking; but she never was taken by herself in that way, and nobody had ever given her any credit for comeliness. It would have been like looking at a jack-in-the-pulpit and losing all the impression that had ever been made on one by roses and hyacinths, and seeing absolutely nothing else but that one flower’s fine green and brown lines; it is doubtful if it would be done.

She had finished her supper, and was sorting her fresh herbs, when the door opened and a woman walked in. She had no bonnet on her head; she was a neighbor, and this was an unceremonious little country place.

“Good evenin’, ‘Relia,” said she. There was an important look on her plain face, as if there was more to follow.

“Good evenin’, Mis’ Atwood. Take a chair.”

“Been herbin’ again?”

“Yes; I went out a little while this afternoon.”

“Where’d you go?—upon Green Mountain?”

“No; I went over to White’s Woods. There were some kinds there I wanted.”

“You don’t say so! That’s a matter of six miles, ain’t it? Ain’t you tired?”

“Lor’, no,” said Aurelia. “I reckon I’m pretty strong, or mebbe the smell of the herbs keeps me up;” and she laughed.

So did the other. “Sure enough—well, mebbe it does. I never thought of that. But it seems like a pretty long tramp to me, though my bein’ so fleshy may make a difference. I could have walked it easier once.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if it did make a difference. I ain’t got much flesh to carry round to tire me out.”

“You’re always pretty well, too, ain’t you, ‘Relia?”

“Lor’, yes; I never knew what ‘twas to be sick. How’s your folks, Mis’ Atwood? Is Viny any better than she was?”

“I don’t know as she is, much. She feels pretty poorly most of the time. I guess I’ll hev you fix some more of that root-beer for her. I thought that seemed to liven her up a little.”

“I’ve got a jug of it all made, down-cellar, and you can take it when you go home, if you want to.”

“So I will, if you’ve got it. I was in hopes you might hev it.”

The important look had not vanished from Mrs. Atwood’s face, but she was not the woman to tell important new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
• Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892)
• Sarah Johnson Prichard (1830-1909)
• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
• Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921)
• Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
• Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)