She was born on October 31, 1852, in Randolph, Massachusetts. Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than a two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories -- A Humble Romance and Other Stories, published in 1887, and A New England Nun and Other Stories, published in 1891 -- as well as for the novel Pembroke, published in 1894.
Freeman is often regarded (read "devalued") even today as a New England regionalist, perhaps because so much of her work was staunchly realist in its depiction of life in decaying New England hill towns.
Freeman's ghost stories have only recently begun to attract appreciative critical attention, and there remains considerable opportunity for further investigation of these works, which in their combination of pragmatism and supernaturalism are very much in the tradition, going back to Charles Brockden Brown, of an "Americanized" Gothic.
One of Freeman's contributions to that stalwart Victorian tradition of the Christmas ghost story, this story is appropriately symbolic and deals lightly with the Gothic element.
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