Williams is an instructor in the Writing Program at Rutgers University. In the following essay, she views Louisa as a woman who has made the most of the limited opportunities open to her and has channeled her creative impulses into the everyday activities of her simple life.

A number of critics have noted that the opening paragraph of Mary Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun" very closely echoes the first stanza of English poet Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, / The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me. In Gray's poem, written in the eighteenth century, the speaker wonders if the rural churchyard might contain the remains of people who had great talents that became stunted or went unrealized and...