When Edith Wharton wrote an introduction to Ethan Frome in 1922, eleven years after its original publication, she explained that she had written it because

In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton explained that Ethan Frome treated “life as it really was … utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett” (293). Wharton’s characterization of Freeman as drawing a world of “sweet-fern, asters and mountain laurel” through “rose-coloured spectacles,” though typical of her time, gravely underestimates Freeman’s portrayal of “granite outcroppings” by glossing over the underlying issues of poverty, isolation, and violence underlying much of Freeman’s fiction.

Wharton’s dismissive portrayal reflects some of the ways in which Freeman has been read by contemporaries and later critics. Praised by contemporaries such as W. D. Howells, but ignored in the era of modernism, Freeman’s work underwent a revival in the 1970s and 1980s beginning with the Feminist Press edition of The Revolt of Mother and Other Stories (1974) and Marjorie Pryse’s Selected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman (1983), both of which focused on feminist themes of women’s community and emphasized stories celebrating women’s transgressions as resistance to a patriarchal social order. As Mary Reichardt observed in her review of Freeman criticism through 1987, however, this selective focus limited the range of contexts in which to read Freeman. Changes in feminism and a less idealized, more complex vision of women’s relationships reveal a shift from “Freeman-the-feminist-communal activist” to “Freeman-the-Gothic-satirist.”