American Authoress

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6626, 12 August 1931, Page 10

American Authoress

Who: MARY E. WILKINS (FREEMAN).

Where: United States. When: Nineteenth to twentieth, centuries.

Why famous: An American author whoso fame rests upon her stories of homely New England people and scenes. Sho was herself born and lived always in that part of the country which later she chose as her literary background. Even before her student days sho was writing, littlo poems, then prose for children, for which a market was found in such magazines as St. Nicholas, Youths' Companion and Harper’s Bazaar. By the time her work was appearing in Harper’s Magazine and she had published her first two books, “Tho Story of Ann” and “A Humble Romance,” Miss Wilkins had taken her place by the Side of Sarah Orno Jewett and Rose Terry Cooke as the portrayer of the New England character.

The critics were enthusiastic in praise of her work; it is said that Dr Holmes and James Russell Lowell congratulated her personally. One reviewer said: “The book came with the force of a new revelation of New England to itself.” Another, this one from abroad, wrote: “Never was real and homely life set out with more beauty and pathos and with abounding innnuur, too.” .Perhaps one secret of her success lay in the fact that her style fitted the subject matter; it was simple, terse and direct, it was rich in detail, it ha*, strength aud conviction. Herself ot puritan stock, Aliss Wilkins delighted to depict the descendants of those early settlers who first populated the remote valleys and rock-ridden fields of New England. (She excelled m tho short story as set forth, for example, in her volume, “Tho New England i\uu and Other Stories, ” published in 1891, though she wrote also several novels and one play of Salem, Mass., during the period when witchcraft was rife. “Pembroke,” which its author styled a novel, is actually a'book of short stones “each having its own situations and its own dramatic interest, strung together on the slender thread .of family ties and village community.” Whoever wishes to know tho New England of half a century ago, distinct and individual in its customs aud traditions, let him seek out the work of Alary L. Willdns.