First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "With all good wishes, Mary E. Wilkins". "The Portion of Labor holds an important place in American literature as one of the few works of fiction that focuses on the controversial issue of child labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (Dawkins, p. 147). The novel is a fine example of Freeman's characteristic concern with the role of women and dwindling rural communities. "The New England countryside and villages of which Freeman wrote were in severe economic decline. Many farmers had left for less sterile land in the West; the more ambitious young men and women had been lured to more lucrative jobs and more exciting lives in the cities. The population remaining on run-out farms and in decaying villages lived in varying degrees of material poverty and spiritual bleakness. [Freeman's] sympathetic understanding of the problems faced by rural and village women and of their determination in living with and overcoming them has attracted the attention of feminist critics, though Freeman herself denied being a feminist" (ANB). Laura Dawkins, "'It won't be long before the grind-mill gets hold of him': Child Labor in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 'The Portion of Labor'", in New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. by Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cécile Roudeau, 2023. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered and ruled in gilt. Tissue-guarded half-tone frontispiece, 7 captioned plates. A touch of wear to spine ends and corners, gauze occasionally visible, particularly between pp. 190 and 191, chips to pp. 143 and 144 and outer margins of pp. 261 to 266, short closed tear to plate facing p. 382, not affecting image: a very good copy.
