Introduction to “The Hall Bedroom”

by William Patten

From Short Story Classics (American) Volume Four (P. F. Collier & Son, New York: 1905)

Mrs. Freeman (born in 1862, at Randolph, Mass.) achieved under her maiden name of Mary Eleanor Wilkins a reputation as the foremost realist among our American short story writers, and now threatens to link in the public mind her married name with the highest order of imaginative fiction. In the present selection, a tale of the fourth dimension, by clever story-telling art, she causes that most contracted of habitable cells, a city hall bedroom, to expand into infinite vistas, not only of space, but of sight, sound, sense, and their other unnamed brothers of the family of sense-perceptions.