A Recovered Children’s Christmas Story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: “The White Witch”

Abstract

To Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s vast œuvre, a new story must be added. “The White Witch” appeared on Sunday, Christmas Eve, 1893, in the Boston Globe, Portland Oregonian, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Louis Republic, and San Francisco Chronicle.1 Advertisements for the story ran in the Boston Globe for December 21–23, 1893. The story appeared with a series of illustrations, although not every edition reproduced all of them. “The White Witch” is a children’s story and a Christmas story, two possible reasons it has hitherto escaped the notice of Freeman’s bibliographers. As Mary Reichardt indicates in her introduction to The Uncollected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman, scholars have focused particularly on Freeman’s short fiction, which demonstrates her “expertise.” Reichardt indicates in her introduction that of Freeman’s “eighty-odd uncollected stories that do not appear” in her edition, “the majority are holiday tales.” Three holidaythemed stories do appear in Reichardt’s volume; however, she argues for their inclusion on the basis of their artistic merit, as stories that succeed in spite of being written expressly for and in the vein of the holiday story. As she explains, the three “achieve internal power and tension in spite of the overt holiday intent.”2 All three stories were written for an adult audience. Often regarded among her strongest works, Freeman’s short fiction is usually assigned to “either or both of the two following literary traditions: regional local color realism and proto-feminist writings.”3 Still, her œuvre as a whole remains difficult to characterize, given the sheer mass of her production and the number of genres in which she published and experimented: nonfiction, poetry, plays, novels, as well as stories for children and adults. Such scholars as James B. Carter and Karl J. Terryberry have recently