“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.”

—Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850; French novelist and playwright whose works are considered foundational to the realism movement in literature; the quote is from his novel Père Goriot.)

Last week, I unveiled the captivating and downright riveting backstory of my The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, highlighting the book’s serendipitous journey from manuscript to publication. I recounted my bold encounter with the president of Scarecrow Press at an American Library Association conference, leading to the acceptance of my manuscript. I shared with you the details of preparing my own camera-ready copy to ensure that the letters I had spent ten years locating, transcribing, and annotating were faithful to their originals when they were published and sent out into the world for all the world to read.

I ended the post with a teaser, hoping to lure you back this week!

In my Scarecrow Press folder that I had forgotten about, I found a forgotten copy of a review that I wrote of my own book. How preposterous is that? Well, it sounds exactly like something that I would do. I’m always telling friends and colleagues that I know no shame. I guess I didn’t back then either. However, I can not for the life of me remember whether I sent my self-review out for publication. I must have because what I discovered in my dusty folder is a photocopy, and it’s so faded that I struggled to read it.

But read it, I did. Dare I say that I enjoyed doing so? I did. Even this many years later, my review strikes me as fresh and refreshing. I’m surprised that I seemed to have found my writer’s voice relatively early in my career, and it has not changed that much at all. Dare I say that I have worked hard down through the years to keep my writer’s voice–even in academic publications–from sounding snotty? I have. Simplicity is always a suit that fits me perfectly in all ways.

By and large, I stand by everything in my review, except for two points. When I wrote the review, I really liked the book’s title, The Infant Sphinx. However, since then, I’ve come to like the title less, and I have come to know Freeman more. Let me explain. In the review, I commented that “I confess to a deep-down-inside wish that a cache of letters secreted away somewhere would be made public and smash to smithereens my claim of having yielded up all there is.”

A cache of letters has not appeared, but enough individual letters have surfaced here and there that I’m working on an updated two-volume work that will use a name more to my liking and more to the liking of Freeman’s closest friends–and presumably more to Freeman’s liking as well– since it’s the name they called her: Dolly. The book title will be Dolly: Life and Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Vol. I: The New England Years (1852-1901). Vol. II: The New Jersey Years (1902-1930).

Now, Dear Readers, I know no shame as I share with you my review of my own scholarly book, written 39 years ago and published for the first time right here, right now..

Enjoy!

Confessions of an Editor:  The Infant Sphinx Reviewed

The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
Edited with Biographical/Critical Introductions and Annotations by Brent L. Kendrick.
(Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1985)
634 pages Illus. ISBN 0-8108-1775-06 $35.00

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, American short-story writer and novelist with more than forty fictional volumes to her credit, has been so long and so unjustly neglected by twentieth century readers that I don’t even blush as I write my own review of her collected letters. A contemporary of Mark Twain, she shared with him the honor of being one of America’s most beloved writers. She was the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Distinguished Work in Fiction. She was among the first women elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was the one posthumously honored when the American Academy of Arts and Letters installed its bronze doors in 1938: “Dedicated to the Memory of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Women Writers of America.”

Obviously, Freeman deserves attention. Twenty-two of her books are in print today. It is fitting that her collected letters should join those volumes rightfully hers and that they should join the slight biography of her that is in print and the equally small critical study.

Freeman was herself described by her townspeople in Randolph, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1852, as “a tiny person, all in brown, like a little mouse.” This volume of her letters is similarly attired: brown buckram covers with gold stamping. But its 634 pages make it somewhat more than tiny. I confess a fear, though, that despite its size and its wealth of information, it might go unnoticed in as unjust a fashion as Freeman herself has gone. I hope not. Once letters appear in print, people are compelled to consult them.

Forgetting this feat, however, it seems to me that a review by a book’s editor (or, for that matter, by a book’s author) is rather innovative and not such a bad idea after all. Who better knows what went into its making? Who better knows why it appears as it does? The answer, of course, is the editor.

The Infant Sphinx was conceived in September 1972. I had just read my first Mary E. Wilkins Freeman short story, “On the Walpole Road.” Before then I had never heard the author’s name. That story so impressed me with its technique, its humor, its characters’ steadfastness in the face of obstacles that I recognized an unusual combination of realism with an inherent belief in man’s thrust toward greatness. Here was a peculiarly American story that was truthful yet positive.

I liked that story so much that I wanted to read more. I moved on to Freeman’s A Humble Romance (1887). The selection was accidental. Little did I know at the time that it was her first collection of adult short stories. Little did I know that it made her a near-overnight success. I learned both facts later. What I knew after finishing that volume was that I liked this author more and more. Then, I read her second collection, A New England Nun (1891). My initial opinion was confirmed: here were powerful stories and powerful characters. Here was a thematic thrust toward greatness. Or, as Freeman said herself in “The Revolt of Mother,” “nobility of character manifests itself in small loop holes when it is not provided large doors.”

I was so intrigued that I wanted to know more about the author. Her biography had been written. But it reduced her entire life to only 194 pages. In fact, it skimmed over her last 30 years in a mere 36 pages. And possibly, worst of all, it had not one photograph of the writer who had so won my attention.

Solace came in the belief that biographies are not always that insightful anyway. So, I resolved to read her letters. I immediately went to a local university library. When I found no catalog entry for Freeman’s correspondence, I attributed it to underdeveloped collections. I checked Books in Print. No luck. I perused guides to our nation’s libraries. Again, no luck. Ultimately, I faced up to the bittersweet fact: Freeman’s letters had never been published.

I resolved at once to undertake the task. I did not dream that it would require nearly ten years. But little did I dream that the letters were deposited in more than fifty library collections (public and personal). They are. Or, perhaps more accurately, were. They are physically still with their owners, of course. But the beauty of an edition of letters is the bringing together of so many separate parts into their rightful whole. That which was scattered becomes united.

A total of 517 items of correspondence were brought together in The Infant Sphinx. Although the last numbered letter in the volume is 510, seven others are “hidden” in between: 110a, 194a, 260a, 281a, 282a, 293a, and 439a. I confess some embarrassment. But what else could I do? All along I had prided myself in including all Freeman letters, even some so scant and some so poor they hardly deserved inclusion. But I wanted the title collected to be accurate. I wanted my claim of having include all letters to be true. So, when these seven wayward epistles were sent to me late in the editing stage, I felt compelled to place them in their proper chronological places.

I confess that I wish there were more. How can it be that a woman who lived so much of her life before the existence of the telephone began to deprive us all of letters wrote so few of the same? Or how can it be that those who received letters from one so popular and so famous kept so few? How can such a woman be survived by a mere 517 letters? I suggest in the edition that Freeman was so busy with her fiction that she did not have much time for letter writing. I point out too that many of her letters were deliberately or accidentally destroyed. I account for the dearth in other ways as well. But I confess to a deep-down-inside wish that a cache of letters secreted away somewhere would be made public and smash to smithereens my claim of having yielded up all there is.

Obviously, it did not take me ten years to collect and edit so few letters. I spent more than half that time gathering biographical material to include in the introduction. The Infant Sphinx has six. The “General Introduction” provides a broad overview. Then there are five others, one for each division. I did not plan it that way initially. But in the end the book took its own shape despite my predetermined wishes. I found myself following the natural biographical divisions of Freeman’s life. Part One, for example, focuses largely on Brattleboro, Vermont, where she launched her literary career, and it traces her shift from a children’s writer (poetry was the genre; children, the audience) to a short story writer for adults. That part, like each of the remaining four, has its own title: “Raising Wonders in a New Literary Field.”

I can take no real credit for those titles. As any perceptive reader will discover, each comes from the letters themselves. I simply selected the quote most appropriate to the section. I remain pleased with the choices. During the years covered by Part One, Freeman did raise wonders on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was in a new literary field. She shifted from poetry to short stories. Her audience changed from children to adults.

“Deviations from My Usual Line of Work” was her title for Part Two. It seemed fit. It was a period of artistic experimentation as she tried her hand at both dramas and novels. I’ve never really cared for her efforts in either direction. I would except from that blanket statement her first two novels, Jane Field (1893) and Pembroke (1894). As for her other thirteen novels, I have not bothered going back to see whether they are any better the second time around. High praises are sounded for her The Shoulders of Atlas (1908). Its probing into homosexuality was a pioneering effort for the time.

Part Three is called “A Hopeless Sort of Chase of Myself.” It was precisely that. Freeman was terribly overworked. She was overworked all her life. How else could she have written over forty volumes in a fifty-year career? But that was not the real reason she was engaged in a hopeless sort of chase. Somehow, she came up with the idea that she should marry even though she was nearly fifty. She decided to leave her native New England where her daily life (and her neighbors’, too) had become almost inseparable from her fiction. Marry. Move. She did both. But she did neither before going off to Paris, presumably to think things over. The trip only made her seasick. It did not change her mind.

She married Charles Manning Freeman, a non-practicing physician, who owned and operated a lucrative coal and lumber business. She moved to her husband’s hometown of Metuchen, New Jersey. Both took place on New Year’s Day, 1902.

That new beginning occupies Part Four, “Tiptoeing Along the Summit.” The quote has nothing to do with the early years of their marriage which were quite happy enough. Neither does it relate to the building of their colonial mansion, “Freewarren,” built with money earned from The Shoulders of Atlas. Nor does it have any relevance to the many volumes of fiction written during that time. Rather, it was prompted by Freeman’s belief that her novel Jerome (1897) was to be made into a movie. On that particular point, Freeman probably tottered from the summit. I was never able to locate a movie version of that novel. Perhaps it appeared under some other title. If so, the underlying work was not credited. Two other movies, however, were made from her books. One was An Alabaster Box (1917) based on the novel of the same name written collaboratively with Florence Morse Kingsley. The other was False Evidence (1919) based on Madelon. That Jerome was not preserved on celluloid hardly matters. Two other novels were. She could rightfully tiptoe.

Earlier in this review I claimed satisfaction with the letter quotes as subtitles. That is, I confess, only four-fifths true. I waivered with Part Five. I changed its title just a few weeks before the volume went to press. Originally, it had been called “Exigencies of Existence.” I had reservations from the start. In the first place, I like words that are easily pronounced and easily understood. Exigencies is neither. But I kept it because it pointed in the direction of truth. Freeman’s final years were difficult. She wrote less and less. Or, more accurately, she wrote quite a lot, but her work was rejected more and more. She had never enjoyed good health, and with age she did so even less.

But most difficult of all was the tragic ending of her marriage. Dr. Freeman had always been fond of his scotch. By 1917 he was so addicted to alcohol and drugs that he was committed to the New Jersey Asylum for the Insane at Trenton. He was released ultimately. Fearing for herself and her servants (of which she usually had several maids and a chauffeur), Freeman obtained a legal separation. Imagine her shock when the doctor died suddenly of heart failure on March 7, 1923, in the home of his chauffeur. Imagine again how she and her four sisters-in-law felt when the chauffeur brought forth a will, naming him as sole executor and heir and leaving Freeman with only $1.00. They fought and broke that will. It required many years and thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees. All the details are in The Infant Sphinx. Little wonder that Freeman spoke of the exigencies of existence.

But that title bothered me beyond my dislike of the word exigencies. The title conveyed only partial truth. Tragedy loomed large in Freeman’s final years. But so did glory. In 1919, Harper & Brothers, her principal publisher all along, brought out a Modern Classics edition of her New England Nun. In 1926, she was the first recipient of the prestigious William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Distinguished Work in Fiction. Also, in 1926, she was among the first women admitted to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1928, Henry Lanier brought out The Best Short Stories of Mary E. Wilkins. Honor came from her Metuchen neighbors as well. They made her an honorary member of the Borough Improvement League. The mayor even proclaimed a “Mary E. Wilkins Day.” “Exigencies of Existence” simply would not do. I fretted. I looked. I looked and I fretted. Finally, I saw a phrase appropriate to the English language and in keeping with a conscience bent on telling the truth. At the last moment, it was selected for Part Five: “Obstacles in the Path of Pleasure and Duty.”

I can’t claim the book’s title either. Neither can Freeman. Henry Mills Alden takes full credit. One of her closest friends and also editor of Harper’s Weekly, he felt that she was so old and wise in some ways and so young and infantile in others that he called her “The Infant Sphinx.” She had visited in his Metuchen home for nearly a decade before moving there herself. The town immediately dubbed itself “The Brainy Borough.” Afterwards the Freemans and the Aldens dined together often. They played bridge together with even greater frequency. And the Aldens regularly critiqued her work. That is, until she became so sensitive that they dared voice only approval. Henry Alden was certainly qualified to give the transplanted spinster an epithet. His certainly outdistanced “Pussy Willow,” the nickname given her by Mary Louise Booth, another close friend and editor of Harper’s Bazar. Equally inferior were three other endearments: “Mamie,” “Dolly,” and “Cherie.” Alden certainly knew best.

The range of possibilities underlying his epithet comes across strongest in the analysis of Freeman as a businesswoman. I confess that there were times when the dollar sign loomed so large and so often in the letters that Freeman’s artistic integrity was called into question. Such bargaining. Such quibbling. Such subtle strategies to get higher and higher prices. Such skill in financially pitting editor against editor. But I confess at the same time that I enjoyed a restoration of faith when I read in the letters that such actions panged her own New England conscience and that they were prompted by harsh necessity.

Here was no Harriet Beecher Stowe with a family and husband to back her. Here was no Sarah Orne Jewett with a doctor for a father. Here was Mary Wilkins. To be sure, she came from good New England stock on both sides. But there was no money. Her father had been a housewright in Randolph, Massachusetts. Later he was a dry goods merchant in Brattleboro, Vermont. But, when he died in 1883, Mary was left alone. Her inheritance was $969 in cash and one-half interest in the Steen/Wilkins block in Brattleboro, Vermont. She was forced to earn her own living. Writing was her second occupational choice. Years later, she recalled, “I did not want to write at all. I wanted to be an artist. But for lack of paint, etc., and sufficiency of pens, ink, and paper, I wrote” (Letter 478). She did a splendid job. One novel alone brought her outright $20,000. With that money she built a grand colonial house. With royalties earned from other fiction, she bought expensive automobiles and antique oriental rugs. She purchased emerald and diamond rings, just to cheer herself out of moods of depression. But she also invested wisely in stocks ranging from American Telephone and Telegraph to Bohemia Gold mining Company. After her death on March 13, 1930, the auctioned value of her estate came to $118,099. Obviously, this was one American writer with a clear business head. What I can’t quite understand is how such a good businesswoman could die and not leave a last will and testament. Freeman did just that.

I confess that I take great pride in the volume’s 16-page special photographic insert section. Here can be found photographs of Freeman, the men, the houses, and the honors in her life. Elsewhere in the volume can be found facsimiles of Freeman’s letters and an architectural drawing by her father.

And now I have my final confession. Writing a review such as this has been tremendously rewarding. I dare hazard it is just as objective, just as honest, and hopefully just as helpful as one by an outsider would be. I’ve never paid much attention to reviews. I’ve always wanted to make up my own mind. I’ve even known of reviews written by reviewers who had not even read the books. That certainly is not the case here.

A review is intended to whet the appetite, to encourage readers to read, to encourage books to sell. I hope this one scores a big success on all three counts. This much I know. Anyone interested in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is compelled to read this edition, or risk being criticized for not exploring all the primary and secondary sources. Anyone interested in women’s studies would do well to take notice. Before Freeman’s time, she had no equal among American women writers. She very well may not have had since then. Anyone interested in nineteenth century American literature can find enough here of significance to merit consulting the volume’s thirty-page index at least. More than a hundred letters are to the House of Harper. There is also extensive correspondence to early American newspaper syndicates. Those individuals whose interests aren’t covered by these categories should read The Infant Sphinx just for the sake of their own enlightenment.