The Last Gift

“Thomas Ruys Smith’s edition of Freeman’s Christmas stories is a revelation! All our presumptions about holiday stories being drenched in sentimentality are demolished by the ways in which Freeman probes the multiple meanings inherent in the acts of giving and receiving gifts and exposes the forms of both solitude and communion inherent in Christmas. This collection transforms our understanding of the season and enhances the literary reputation of this remarkable author.” ~Alfred Bendixen, executive director of the American Literature Association

“A lovely and varied collection of Freeman’s often-neglected Christmas stories. Smith’s lively introduction contextualizes Freeman’s portrayal of the holiday season, in all of its complexity, and the domestic tensions that Christmas evoked for nineteenth-century women.” ~Leah Blatt Glasser, author of In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

“The Last Gift will prove anyone wrong who once said with Mark Twain, ‘I hate Xmas stories.’ Funny and grave, delicate and ironical, Freeman’s Christmas stories talk about old age and queer desires, ecoanxiety and the love of trees, class tension, capitalistic drives, and the beauty of an old child braving it all to have her ‘Christmas once.’ A gift for all, and for all seasons.” ~Cécile Roudeau, coeditor of New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain

“Finally, a volume that reprints Freeman’s Christmas fare. Her seasonal stories are inventive and experimental, emphasizing the emotional and practical complexities of the holiday, with profound implications for gendered labor, class inequality, the building of community, and the pleasures and perils of consumption. The impressive introduction frames the stories within the history of the holiday and Freeman’s delight in its intrigue.” ~Stephanie Palmer, coeditor of New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain

“Celebrated in her own time not only as a New England regionalist but also as a writer of popular Christmas stories, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman challenged the genre’s sentimental limits by questioning the relationships between charity and obligation, theft and gift, and transgression and redemption which her characters experience at Christmas. As Thomas Ruys Smith argues in his excellent, lively, and comprehensive introduction to these twenty-five stories, some published for the first time since their original appearance, Freeman’s unjustly neglected Christmas stories reveal a new understanding both of the genre’s significance and of Freeman’s career as a professional writer.” ~Donna Campbell, author of Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing