Introduction to Giles Corey, Yeoman
by Donald R. Anderson

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) was known principally in her own time as a recorder of the New England decline of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.  Her novels and short stories were characterized by the economies of her prose and her depictions of individuals struggling to maintain a sense of dignity in a region of increasing economic hardship.  A number of these works were rediscovered and republished in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century—particularly stories like “The Revolt of `Mother’” and “A New England Nun,” which have been heavily anthologized.

Giles Corey, Yeoman is an exception to most of what we associate with Freeman.  First of all, it is set in the early days of New England, in 1692, exactly two centuries before when she is writing it.  She rarely left the contemporary world for her other writings.   Secondly, of course, it is a play—the only one she brought to the stage [in 1893 by the Theater of Arts and Production in Boston].  Ms. Wilkins—she would marry Dr. Charles Freeman in 1902—drew heavily for the story of Giles Corey upon Charles W. Upham’s two-volume study of 1866, Salem Witchcraft. According to biographer Perry Westbrook, she had, in fact, a familial interest in Upham’s Salem accounts since her earliest American ancestor, Bray Wilkins, was instrumental in having his grandson hanged as a witch.  She did take her own departures from historical truth, however—among other things creating the love interest of Olive Corey and Paul Bayley, and reversing the chronological order of the Giles and Martha Corey executions.

For a recent discussion of the play, see Donald R. Anderson, “Giles Corey and the Pressing Past.” American Transcendental Quarterly. 14.2 (2000): 113-126.