Mobilizing the Great War in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Edgewater People

This chapter discusses the rarely mentioned Great War fiction of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, mostly collected in her 1919 volume, Edgewater People. It describes the energies of American military mobilization and enlistment as crucial concerns in her representations of the home front in a small but vital series of stories: “The Liar,” “Both Cheeks,” “The Soldier Man,” and “The Return”. This analysis confirms the flexibility and power of Freeman’s established style, while contextualizing her personal anxieties about her supposedly waning artistic and cultural influence. It also considers her place in the tradition of women’s war writing, while exploring the ways in which older, more established women writers during World War I might trouble disciplinary lines of periodization in literary history. In sum, the mobilization fiction of Edgewater People offers us an opportunity to rethink the standard stories we tell about late Freeman and about a generation of realist writers active and publishing well within the periodized confines of modernism.