American writer (sometimes known as "Mary E. Wilkins" or "Mary Wilkins"), born on Halloween in 1852. Freeman is often regarded (read "devalued") even today as a New England regionalist, perhaps because so much of her work was staunchly realist in its depiction of life in decaying New England hill towns. Her reputation went into decline for much of the mid-C20, for her "feminine" subjects were often dismissed by critics as simply unimportant in the context of larger world events. More recent scholarship has argued convincingly for the importance of Freeman's work, which often does feature spinster heroines or — especially in some of her more well-known ghost stories — abandoned children (this "forlorn child" theme is widely thought to be Freeman's working out of her own feelings regarding the death, at age seventeen, of her sister). Freeman's ghost stories have only recently begun to attract appreciative critical attention, and there remains considerable opportunity for further investigation of these works, which in their combination of pragmatism and supernaturalism are very much in the tradition, going back to Charles Brockden Brown, of an "Americanized" Gothic. More particularly, these stories are powerfully illustrative of the claim that many female writers of the time used the ghost story as a means of examining, indirectly, many of the social, personal, and economic pressures which often silenced or devalued women and their concerns.
