Short stories
A New England Nun and Other Stories
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman · 1891
Opening lines
It was late in the afternoon, and the light was waning. There was a difference in the look of the tree shadows out in the yard.
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
The volume opens with Louisa Ellis, who sews in her bright room, picks her gooseberries and sets a porcelain place for herself alone. Her fiancé, who left to seek his fortune in Australia fourteen years earlier, has come back, and the wedding is set for a month's time. He comes into her house bringing dust, disturbs the order of the books, knocks over her sewing basket and sends the canary into a panic. She watches him. Elsewhere in the collection, a farmer's wife, tired of waiting for the promised house, moves her family into the new barn her husband has just built for his cows.
Context
The story that gives the volume its title had appeared on its own in Harper's Bazar in May 1887, and the story that closes it in Harper's Monthly in 1890; they entered her second collection for adults in 1891, twenty-four stories published by Harper. The character of Louisa was read between the wars as a repression, then by feminist criticism of the 1970s as a choice. As early as 1896, Th. Bentzon translated the title story in the Revue des Deux Mondes. William Dean Howells, her friend and admirer, would give his name to the medal of which she would be the first recipient.
Who it is for
A collection of twenty-four short stories, to be read separately, in which everything plays out in household gestures. It is not fully translated into French.
Prizes and reception
One of the two collections that reference works retain from its author, and one of the most studied texts of American regional realism.
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