Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Mary Eleanor Wilkins was born on 31 October 1852 in Randolph, Massachusetts, south of Boston, to a family of strict Congregationalists. When she was fifteen the family moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where her father tried and failed to make a living as a shopkeeper. She spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. By her early thirties both of her parents and her only surviving sibling had died, and she was left with very little money. She went back to Randolph and lived with a childhood friend’s family while she wrote for a living.

She turned out to be very good at it. Her stories of small-town New England life began appearing in Harper’s in the 1880s, and the collections A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891) made her one of the best-known American writers of the decade. Her subjects were mostly women: unmarried, widowed, poor, proud, getting by in villages the young men had left. She married a doctor, Charles Freeman, in 1902 and moved to Metuchen, New Jersey. The marriage was unhappy, and her husband’s alcoholism eventually led to his commitment. In 1926 she became one of the first women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen on 13 March 1930.

Her ghost stories were collected in The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), and all three stories here come from it. They take place in the same villages as her realist fiction and are told in the same plain voice, which is why they work. In Luella Miller the village gossips gradually describe a vampire without ever using the word. In The Shadows on the Wall three sisters argue, politely, about a shadow on the study wall that nothing in the room could cast. In The Wind in the Rose-Bush the horror is a household that will not quite answer a direct question.

“Luella Miller” is the place to start. It is one of the best American ghost stories of its era, and it is as much about a community’s complicity as about the thing in the empty house.