Leah Blatt Glasser
In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Pp. 266. $24.75
Reviewed by Mary Rimmer

Since her death, the American realist Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and her finely crafted fiction have almost disappeared from literary discussion, with the exception of a few books, occasional mentions under the heading of New England regionalism or “local colour,” and some anthology pieces. Recently, however, feminist critics in particular have turned to Freeman with renewed interest, and a biographical study is a welcome addition to this small but growing body of work; Edward Foster’s Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1956) and an earlier, unpublished one by Thomas Schuler Shaw have been the only biographies available.

If other commentators have emphasized either Freeman’s “femininity” or her rebellion against the conventionally feminine, for Leah Blatt Glasser’s Freeman “femininity” is disputed territory, marked by unstable contradictions be­tween rebellion and submission, marriage and spinsterhood, heterosexual love and homosocial (if not lesbian) desire. What we know of Freeman’s life suggests that these characterized her experience as well as her fiction: she not only supported herself by writing, bargained politely but hard-headedly over payment, and chose to live unmarried with a female friend for nearly twenty years, but also made an unfortunate marriage at the age of forty-nine, and wrote “uplifting” fiction ending in conventional marriage as well as stories about rebellious women. In this sense, Glasser’s view of her subject as “haunted by contradictions” (xvi) sheds useful light on Freeman’s life and work.

Yet the “life and work” formulation points precisely to the major limitation of In a Closet Hidden: its over-reliance on fiction as a biographical source. Granted, archival material on Freeman is scanty. Few extant letters mention her childhood, youth, or experience of marriage, and many are fragments selected and tran­scribed by her correspondents. Even anecdotal sources, problematic in themselves, have become largely inaccessible except as preserved by Foster and Shaw. Nevertheless, it is a dubious decision to supply this lack by turning to Freeman’s fiction. Her realism and some of her statements about fiction’s basis in memory may seem to justify it, but they make it no easier to trace the complex and shifting links between experience, memory, and fiction. Realist or not, no writer’s fiction simply unlocks her state of mind, still less the events of her life, and Freeman’s fiction about girls, spinsters, and married women does not readily translate into a record of herself as girl, spinster, and married woman.

Organized around various poles of contradiction rather than in strict chronological order, and mentioning dates only rarely, In a Closet Hidden often obscures the trajectory of Freeman’s career. “Old Maid Aunt,” for instance, Freeman’s disruptive contribution to the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908), is discussed before her own novel Pembroke (1894), because “Old Maid Aunt” belongs to Chapter 3, which deals with spinsterhood and corresponds roughly to Freeman’s spinster years; Pembroke, on the other hand, is the subject of Chapter 4 because it deals with marriage and the debate between marriage and spinsterhood that Glasser sees as crucial to Freeman’s “transitional” period (leading up to her 1902 marriage to Charles Freeman). At times the paucity of dates produces more than confusion, as when Freeman’s friendship with Mary Louise Booth, the editor of Harper’s Bazar, is described as spanning “all her adult life” (162); in fact Booth died in 1889, about six years after Freeman first began corresponding with her. Since no reference to the date of Booth’s death appears in the text or notes, readers will likely conclude that her relationship with Freeman lasted much longer than it did.

Such misleading handling of evidence is not infrequent, another example being the discussion of Hanson Tyler. Arguing that Freeman’s love for this fickle and often absent naval officer was something of a deliberate choice, made to justify her remaining single, Glasser quotes an 1875 letter of Tyler’s to his aunt (not his mother, as Glasser has it), where he breezily denies attachment to any one woman; she then comments that we have “no record of correspondence between Hanson and Mary” (20). She neglects to mention two references to Tyler in Freeman’s letters; in 1886 and 1887 she writes of seeing off and corresponding with a seafaring “friend,” mentioning dates and places which match the movements of Tyler’s ship. No letters between Tyler and Freeman survive, but they certainly seem to have corresponded during the 1880s, if not after they first met in 1873.

Overall, its lapses of rigor and accuracy are such that In a Closet Hidden can only partially fill the need for a new biography of this unjustly neglected writer.