Her villages, where the churches, the schools, and the town-meeting governments had lost their original vigor or seemed hardly to function, were communities where women, disenfranchised politically and barred from the ministry, far outnumbered the men and where the men who remained were more often than not moral and intellectual weaklings. Thus Freeman wrote of a woman's world, and since her women, many of them strong characters but others weak and neurotic, somehow cope, she has attracted the attention of feminist literary critics--a development which, after a period of neglect, has contributed to her rehabilitation as an important American author. But mostly the renewal of her reputation is ascribable to the fact that in her skill at evoking atmosphere and mood and in her psychological perceptions she anticipates such authors as Katherine Anne Porter and Katherine Mansfield. And as a depicter of rural New Englanders she must be considered in the company of Sarah Orne Jewett, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost.
Freeman wrote about conditions, places, and people that she had known at firsthand all her life. She was born Mary Ella Wilkins in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1852. (Her middle name was later changed to Eleanor.) Both her father, Warren E.
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