Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in small New England towns whose closed, often severe domestic world became the subject of her fiction. She was one of the leading American "local color" writers of her generation, best known for short-story collections such as A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891) and, in a different vein, The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). In 1926 she was among the first recipients of the William Dean Howells Medal for Fiction. She married late, at forty-nine, and died in Metuchen, New Jersey, at seventy-seven.