Books by Mary S. Watts
The Tenants, 1908.
Nathan Burke, 1910.
The Legacy, 1911.
Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family, 1913.
The Rise of Jennie Cushing, 1914.
The Rudder, 1916.
Three Short Plays, 1917.
The Boardman Family, 1918.
From Father to Son, 1919.
The Noon Mark, 1920.
The House of Rimmon, 1922.
Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York.
CHAPTER XV
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
IF this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be found in three considerations:
Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her successes have been with short stories, and they have been many.
Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of which we have not been perfectly aware—her stories are cordially welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint consciousness that once in some place among a few people they may have had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them—and that is all.
The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, The Copy-Cat, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book! The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty:
“Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life. Thereafter she went to school ‘dressed like the best,’ and her mother petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet.
“It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality.
“One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company, and tea was served.
“‘I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,’ Lily whispered to Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.
“‘Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.’”
This in the year of our Lord 1914! This in the year when blood began to flow as it has never flowed before; when free peoples everywhere awoke to the presence of Black Evil on earth; when big, generous America with all her faults was not exactly likely to be thrilled or touched or enlightened by the recital of how a plain little girl finally got up enough gumption to wear pink ribbons instead of blue. And yet we suppose the people who set such store by “literary” values thought this a “delightful little story”—“so true a picture of children”—“and wasn’t that a charming conceit of sleeping in each other’s beds!” But it is wretched stuff, really. At the end Mrs. Freeman simply tells you that after “that night” Amelia’s mother’s whole nature changed and the uninterestingly imitative little girl developed “a little stamp of individuality” and will you please swallow all this quickly on Mrs. Freeman’s mere say-so because she is tired of writing and the thing is already the right magazine length anyway. Bah!
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is an extremely modest person. She is of New England stock in both lines. Her ancestors were Puritan colonists. She was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, and received her education there and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. Ten years of her life were spent in Brattleboro, Vermont, but after the death of her parents she returned to Randolph where she made her home until her marriage on New Year’s Day, 1902, to Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. Since then Mrs. Freeman has lived in Metuchen.
Exactly when the intention to write first came to her, Mrs. Freeman does not remember. She always felt that she must work at something, but did not know what it was to be. Though she was fond of painting and sculpture, her chief interest as a girl was reading. Socially, her tastes were exceedingly catholic, and she was on the best of terms with all her neighbors, many of whom she found herself studying as characteristic New England types, thus unconsciously preparing herself for the moment when she was to become a writer. She likes “people who drop their g’s and use the double negative, as well as people who don’t.”
Success as a writer came to her instantly. She suffered none of the rebuffs and delays and discouragements usual to the young author. Her earliest work was done for children and took the form of short stories and poems in juvenile magazines. Her first grown-up story was The Old Lovers, sent to Harper’s Bazar. Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of that periodical, upon receiving this contribution, written in a cramped and unformed handwriting, evidently that of a child, determined upon a hasty reading, but was so struck in the opening paragraphs with the humor and the pathos of the story that she promptly sent Mrs. Freeman a check. In the same mail with the Bazar acceptance came a notification that her story, The Shadow Family, had captured the prize in a competition conducted by the Boston Sunday Budget. Both the checks seemed very large to the new writer. “My delight and astonishment knew no bounds.”
Mrs. Freeman is a rather small woman, singularly unaffected, cordial, frank. A friend once described her thus: “A little, frail-looking creature, with a splendid quantity of pale-brown hair, and dark-blue eyes with a direct look and a clear, frank expression—eyes that readily grow bright with fun.” Mrs. Freeman has plenty of humor, is quiet and whimsical, is fond of country ways, but confesses to fear of cows, caterpillars and all creeping things.
Her popularity has been sufficient to bring about the translation of a number of her books into various European languages.