A Far-Away Melody And Other Stories — Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

"We express our unfeigned admiration for her delicate work, when we first made acquaintance with it in A Far-away Melody. Miss Wilkins's fiction is, so far as the English tongue is concerned, unrivalled-a thing to itself. It depicts the humble village life of the Eastern States with surprising realism of detail; the slipshod, illiterate, dialect is not one whit softened, and all the sordid, poverty-stricken, modes of living are presented with the faithfulness of a Dutch genre picture, or a photograph. But over all this harsh crudeness of material detail, there is, in the spirit of the tales, a poetic glamour which not only redeems them from anything like squalor, but invests these simple annals of les desherites de la terre with a sort of glory and effulgence, and makes them elevating and ennobling."
-The Westminster Review, Volume 136 1891]