Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71. Freeman's parents were orthodox Congregationalists, causing her to have a very strict childhood. Religious constraints play a key role in some of her works. She later finished her education at West Brattleboro Seminary. She passed the greater part of her life in Massachusetts and Vermont. Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). Her stories deal mostly with New England life and are among the best of their kind. Freeman is also remembered for her novel Pembroke (1894), and she contributed a notable chapter to the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908). In 1902 she married Doctor Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen and was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
Series
Books
The Yates Pride
A Romance
1912
The Wind in the Rosebush and Other Stories of the Supernatural
1903
The Southwest Chamber
1903
Collected Ghost Stories
1974
The pumpkin giant,
1970
Jimmy Scarecrow's Christmas
2007
Shadows on the Wall
Dark Tales by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
2022
The Revolt of Mother
1891
Chloe Plus Olivia
An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
1994
Classic Ghost Stories by Wilkie Collins, M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Others
1930
The Copy-Cat and Other Stories
1914
Damas oscuras
Cuentos de fantasmas de escritoras victorianas eminentes
2017
Madres oscuras
2023
Classic Ghost Stories
Tales of horror, mystery and the supernatural
2006
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories
2000
The Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Megapack
59 Classic Stories
2013
A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader
1997
A New England Nun and Other Stories
1891
Two Friends
1887
The Ultimate Christmas Collection
2020
A Stolen Christmas
1887
Luella Miller
1902
The Best Short Stories of All Time, Volume VII
2020
The Revolt of "Mother" and Other Stories
1891
Evelina's Garden
1899
The Big Book of the Masters of Horror
120+ authors and 1000+ stories
2018
The Big Book of Christmas
140+ authors and 400+ novels, novellas, stories, poems & carols
2020
Góticas y tenebrosas
Mujeres que cuentan historias oscuras
2021
Jane Field
1892
Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
1983
The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories
1987
Old Woman Magoun
2025
Doc. Gordon
1906
The Green Door
1910
Classic Horror Stories
2015
The Lost Ghost
2001
The Shadows on The Wall
1903
Pembroke
1894
A Humble Romance and Other Stories
1887
Lost Ghosts
The Complete Weird Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
2023
The Butterfly House
1912
