In a Closet Hidden by Leah Blatt Glasser

The first literary biography of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), the New England short story writer and novelist long dismissed as a local colorist. Leah Blatt Glasser shows that Freeman was among the first American writers to explore women's relationships outside marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women's lives, the complexity of women's sexuality, and the inner lives of rebellious women, tracing in her fiction conflicts between creativity and convention, spinsterhood and marriage, and lesbianism and heterosexuality.