Description

Mary E. Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts and at fifteen moved with her family to Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1884, left without any immediate family, she returned to Randolph, where she lived for almost twenty years with her childhood friend Mary Wales. She began to write seriously, and her work began to appear in such popular magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Monthly Magazine.

At age 49, she married Charles Manning Freeman, a New Jersey physician, and moved to Metuchen. Thereafter she wrote under the name Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman. In 1926, she received the William Dean Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Later that year, she was among the first women to be elected to membership in the National Institute of Art and Letters.