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.”