Reproduction of the original: Evelina’s Garden by Mary E. Wilkins

Evelina's Garden is the half tragic, half romance tale of Evelina Adams. After a series of tragedies in her youth culminating in a devastating disappointment in love, she turns her attention to creating a garden, to which she is fully devoted. Years later when in her seventies, her younger cousin Evelina Leonard comes to live with her. Young Evelina is romantically involved with Thomas Merriam. But it seems that she too might have the same fate as her older cousin with the son of the very man that disappointed older Everlina...

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned--natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience--this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852?1930), born in Randolph, Massachusetts, began to publish stories about New England in the early 1880s. In the following decades, Freeman drew widespread praise for her intimate portraits of women and her realistic depictions of rural New England life. She published short stories, essays, novels, plays, and children?s books. ø Her stories, written in a clear and direct prose, are remarkable for their unpretentious, sympathetic portrayals of the lives of ordinary New Englanders of Freeman?s era. Many of the stories depict rebellion against oppressive social and private conditions. Others describe conflicting desires for independence and lasting relationships. ø This volume of twenty-eight stories is the first to provide a representative sample of Freeman?s finest work, from all phases of her career. It makes plain why Freeman (in the words of editor Mary R. Reichardt) is widely recognized as an important figure ?in the history of American women?s fiction . . . and the development of the American short story.?

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