its political
importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of
ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one
field of literature only has New England maintained its rank since
the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here women have
distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men.
Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the
pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have
written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as
perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers
portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their
instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated,
in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive and
acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing over into
avarice, and mental power degenerating into smartness; cold and hard
under long repression of emotion, yet capable of passion and fanaticism;
at worst, a mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with
an austere physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch
graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, to linger
in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown has shown the pathos
of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness denied.
Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its fundamental tragedies of will.

Two of the best known writers of New England fiction in this period
were not natives of the soil, though they surpassed most native New
Englanders in their understanding of the type. They were William Dean
Howells and Henry James. Mr. Howells, who, in his own words, "can
reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German,
and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American," came to "the
Holy Land at Boston" as a "passionate pilgrim from the West." "A Boy's
Town," "My Literary Passions," and "Years of my Youth" make clear the
image of the young poet-journalist who returned from his four years in
Venice and became assistant editor of "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1866. In
1871 he succeeded Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after
his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full strength into those
realistic