Leah Blatt Glasser finds that her work as dean of first-year studies and as an English teacher has been greatly enhanced by the experiences she can share about her own research and writing. Glasser's literary biography--In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman--illuminates "conflicts shared by so many women in the nineteenth century," she says. "Freeman's life and work reflected the urge to claim autonomy and the simultaneous pressure to conform to the restrictive norms of femininity. Those tugs are still with us today."
In her short stories, essays, novels, plays, and poems, Freeman often placed rebellious heroines in conventional contexts. Yet her work also "explored the psychology of women's conflicts, the complexity of women's sexuality, the role of work in women's lives, the experience and stigma of nineteenth-century spinsterhood, and the unique relationships that women formed outside of marriage and motherhood," Glasser says. Freeman gave voice to the socially unacceptable aspects of nineteenth-century women's inner lives that they had to keep "in a closet hidden," to use Freeman's phrase.
Before Glasser applied a feminist analysis to her work, Freeman was often dismissed as a "local colorist" for writing about her native New England. Glasser's research and writing about Freeman revived Freeman's reputation; her work is now frequently anthologized in women's studies and literature courses. As critic Sara Ruddick says, Glasser has written "an evocative, moving story which is also a pleasure to read ... Freeman, surrounded by her splendid fictional creations, comes alive within her own cultural context for ours."
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