A New England Nun and Other Stories Book

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman mined the same territory in her native rural New England, for the stuff of short fiction, as her fellow regional Realist author Sarah Orne Jewett. Although Freeman made a point not to read Jewett's work, to keep from being unduly influenced, the two women share a deep sympathy for the people they wrote about, keen observation of human nature and an ear for dialogue, and a moral vision, as well as a literary school of thought and a common regional identity. Both were, IMO, profoundly gifted writers; my rating of this collection one star higher than I did Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories is simply owing to the fact that I happen to especially like a larger number of the stories included here. (Neither collection, of course, includes all of the stories either woman wrote.)

The 24 stories in this collection are, above all, explorations of human psychology, relationships and interactions. Their particular setting in time and place is well-realized (Freeman, for instance, reproduces the rural New England dialect with tape-recorder accuracy), but their themes are universal. Freeman's characters don't typically make ultra-dramatic moral decisions that impact the world on a big scale (their social environments are small and circumscribed), but they make real ones that affect how they treat other people, and who they themselves are as people. Life's circumstances aren't always kind in these stories, and rural New England isn't always the home of unalloyed virtue; the author is well aware of the selfishness, greed, and meanness of some humans, though her sympathies are with the opposite. But her characters aren't defeated by life, and her vision is never cynical. Only one story, "Life Everlastin,'" directly reflects her own Christian convictions; but several of them depict the role of traditional Protestantism (the title character of the title story isn't a literal nun) and church life in the rural New England communities of that day. (That's a picture that's not without its truthful shadings of pettiness, judgmental attitudes, and turf battles; but the mirror is held up, not to condemn, but to encourage improvement.). My personal favorite story is the often-anthologized "The Revolt of 'Mother,"" which packs a strong equalitarian feminist message. "A Kitchen Colonel" also explores atypical gender roles, this time with a male protagonist. Gentle, self-sacrificing (and sorely under-appreciated!) Abel Lee is one of Freeman's most endearing characters, at least in my estimation.

Fred Lewis Pattee, one of America's more prominent literary critics at the time the collection was published, contributes an over 19-page bio-critical introduction, which is insightful and worth reading. One of his comments makes a fitting conclusion to this review: "she sends her reader away always more kindly of heart, more tolerant, more neighborly, in the deeper sense of the word."