For her work, everything in her life was a preparation. She was born in Randolph not far from Boston, of an ancestry which extended back into the darkest shadows of Puritanism, to old Salem and a judge in the witchcraft trials. Her more immediate progenitors were of humble station: her father was first a builder in her native Randolph, then a store-keeper in Brattleboro, Vermont. Thus her formative years were passed in the narrow environment of New England villages. The death of her father and mother during her early girlhood must also be recorded, as should the fact that her schooling was austere and limited.
When she approached literature, therefore, it was as a daughter of the Puritans, as one who had been nurtured in repression. Love in its tropical intensity, the fierce play of the passions, color, profusion, outspoken toleration, freedom--romance in its broadest connotation--of these she knew nothing. She had lived her whole life in the warping atmosphere of inherited Puritanism, of a Puritanism that had lost its earlier vitality and had become a convention and a superstition, in a social group inbred for generations and narrowly restricted to neighborhood limits. "They were all narrow-lived country people," she writes. "Their customs had made deeper grooves in their roads; they were more fastidious and jealous of their social rights than many in higher positions."[111] "Everything out of the broad, common track was a horror to these men, and to many of their village fellows. Strange shadows that their eyes could not pierce, lay upon such, and they were suspicious."[112] "She was a New England woman, and she discussed all topics except purely material ones shamefacedly with her sister."[113]
In the mid eighties when she began her work the primitive Puritan element had vanished from all but the more remote and sheltered nooks of New England. The toll of the war, the Western rush, and the call of the cities had left behind the old and the conservative and the helpless, the last distorted relics of a distorting old régime. To her these were the true New England: she would write the last act of the grim drama that had begun at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. She recorded it very largely in her first four volumes: _A Humble Romance_, twenty-four short stories as grim and austere as Puritanism itself; _A New England Nun and Other Stories_; _Jane Field_, a prolonged short story; and _Pembroke, a Novel_. This is the vital part of her work, the part that is to bear up and preserve her name if it is to endure.