Introduction & Overview of A New England Nun

This Study Guide consists of approximately 37 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A New England Nun.

Introduction & Overview of A New England Nun

This Study Guide consists of approximately 37 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of A New England Nun.
This section contains 248 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the A New England Nun Study Guide

A New England Nun Summary & Study Guide Description

A New England Nun Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Bibliography on A New England Nun by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.

When "A New England Nun" was first published in A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Mary Wilkins Freeman was already an established author of short stories and children's literature. Her first book of short stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), had received considerable critical and popular attention, and she published stories in such notable journals as Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Monthly, and the New York Sunday Budget.

Mary Wilkins Freeman is often classified as a "local color writer." This means that she attempted to capture the distinct characteristics of regional America. Other well-known local colorists were Sarah Orne Jewett (with whom Freeman was often compared) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin). As in the work of other local color writers, a recognizable regional setting plays an important part in most of Freeman's stories. However, she differed from writers such as Jewett and Stowe in that she rarely engaged in the meticulous description of places and people that they favored. The details in her stories tend to have symbolic significance, and most critics agree that her themes are more universal than those commonly found in much local color writing of the time. She is admired for her simple, direct prose and her insight into the psychology of her characters. "A New England Nun" has a very simple, perhaps even contrived plot. Yet Freeman manages to depict skillfully the personalities involved in this small drama and the time in which they lived.

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This section contains 248 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the A New England Nun Study Guide
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A New England Nun from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.