The effects of a declining cottage industry in shoe manufacturing, a decreasing male population, and emerging cultures and economies unfamiliar to small-town inhabitants all find a place in Freeman's fiction. What emerges from a study of her life and her work, however, is not an isolated woman composing photographic representations of an era and judging its barren landscape and obstinate people, as critics and biographers have suggested; rather, one sees a woman with a complex life whose corpus of work--comprising fourteen novels, more than two hundred short stories, three plays, three volumes of poetry, stories for children, several nonfiction pieces, and two screenplays--resists simplification and generalization. Freeman experienced poverty and wealth, rural and city living, "spinsterhood" and marriage. Although much of her work focuses on the lives of women and the poor, it also treats a broader array of issues and contributes to the literary and social debates of her time, which have remained relevant: debates about regionalism and realism, sexual identity, class and labor relations, and race.
Freeman was born Mary Ella Wilkins on 31 October 1852 in the small shoe manufacturing town of Randolph, Massachusetts. She was the first surviving child of Warren Wilkins and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins, both of whom came from longstanding New England families.
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