American & Canadian Literature, Feminism, US & Canadian Literary Biography, Literary Theory, Gay & Lesbian Studies, General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism, Sex Role

In a Closet Hidden

Name: In a Closet Hidden
Author: Leah Blatt Glasser
ISBN: 9781558490277

by Leah Blatt Glasser

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Overview

The first literary biography of a much-neglected American writer, this book explores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852-1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England. Yet as Leah Blatt Glasser shows, Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women's lives, the complexity of women's sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures. In a Closet Hidden traces Freeman's evolution as a writer, showing how her own inner conflicts repeatedly found expression in her art. As Glasser demonstrates, Freeman's work examined the competing claims of creativity and convention, self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice, spinsterhood and marriage, lesbianism and heterosexuality.

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Editorials

Brad Hooper

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, along with Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewitt, has been rediscovered by the reading public, and her works--as well as theirs--are now taught in college and high-school classrooms. By a Mount Holyoke College instructor of English, this literary biography of Freeman releases her from the constrictive label of "local colorist," seeing her novels and stories as universal in meaning and significance. Glasser analyzes those aspects of society's definition of women in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century New England that Freeman accepted or rejected, both in her writing and in the way she led her own life, from traditional notions of female sexuality to those concerning women's economic independence. Heavy going for the general reader, but appreciators of serious literature will find ample rewards in this illuminating study.