The Copy Cat and Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Fiction, Literary, Short Stories

MARY E. WILKINS-FREEMAN (1852-1930) was best known in her own day as a regional writer, for her stories depicting the bleak life of the New England rural populace of her day. Her best collections in his mode are A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). She is probably better remembered today for her ghost stories, first collected in The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), which likewise makes use of deftly-observed regional detail. This collection includes her best-known story, "The Shadows On the Wall," which H.P. Lovecraft praised for its "consummate skill" in the depiction of "a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy."