--1852 born to Warren Wilkins (carpenter) and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins in Randolph, Massachusetts

--1858 death of younger brother

--1859 enters common school

--1867 family moves to Battleboro, Vermont after her father falls victim to post- Civil War depression

--1872 attends Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for 1 year

--1873 family falls victims to economic distress

-- family moves 3 times within Battleboro due to poverty

-- Mary pursues painting to earn money for her family

--1876 only sister Ana dies

--1877 family moves into home of wealthy family to do house and yard work

--1880 mother dies

--1881 Mary receives money for the first time for writing children stories "Beggar King" and "The Tithing"

--1881 publishes "Wide-Awake"

--1882 publishes "The Shadow Family"

--1883 publishes "Two Old Lovers," long-lasting friendship with editor and critic Mary Louis Booth begins, Mary’s father dies

--1887 publishes A Humble Romance and Other Stories

--1891 publishes A New England Nun and Other Stories

--1894 publishes Pembroke

--1897 engagement to Charles Freeman

--1898 publishes Silence and Other Stories

--1902 marriage to Charles Freemen, they settle in Metechun, New Jersey

--1908 publishes The Shoulders of Atlas

--1921 husband committed for alcoholism and drug addiction

--1922 Mary and Charles legally separated

--1923 husband dies

--1925 receives William Dean Howells Medal for outstanding fiction

--1930 Mary dies of heart-failure

--inner world of women

--villagers of New England

--effects of Puritanism

--the morality of women

--rebellious women

--poverty

--passivity vs. action

--marriage

--Knight, Denise, ed. "Mary Wilkins Freeman." Nineteenth Century American Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westword, Connecticut: Greeenwood, 1990. 139-149.

--Reichardt, Mary R. "Backgrounds." A Web of Relationship: Women in the Short Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992. 3-17.