Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Also found under Short Fiction, Poetry, Children's Literature, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in 1852 in Massachusetts. As a child, she loved fairytales and literature at large, and enjoyed such authors as Charles Dickens, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Leo Tolstoy. She wrote some of her earliest short stories with her friend, Evelyn Sawyer, and went on to write popular poems, children's books, and short stories/collections, including The New England Nun & Other Stories. Among her most famous short stories is the radical The Revolt of Mother, which, along with many more of her stories, featured strong female leads with taciturn male side characters. In the 1920s, Freeman won the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and became one of the first women elected to the National Institute for Arts and Letters.
What Did She Write About?
Lives of and equality for Chinese individuals, Romance, Race, Identity, Immigrant experience, Autobiography
Where Can I Find Her Work?
“'Father, you come here.' Sarah Penn stood in the door like a queen; she held her head as if it bore a crown; there was that patience which makes authority royal in her voice. Adoniram went”
-Excerpted from The Revolt of Mother