Author: Florence Morse Kingsley

Florence Morse Kingsley was an American novelist whose popular fiction often joined domestic life, moral questions, and social change. An Alabaster Box, written with Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, appeared in 1917 from D. Appleton and Company with illustrations by Stockton Mulford. The novel follows life in a New England community where money, reputation, memory, and charitable intentions bring neighbors into conflict. Its shared authorship connects Kingsley’s broad popular readership with Freeman’s established work on New England characters and village society. Kingsley lived from 1859 to 1937 and produced a substantial bibliography that includes Titus, A Comrade of the Cross and The Transfiguration of Miss Philura. Her bibliography also includes novels, religious stories, and historical fiction. In An Alabaster Box, the collaborators build drama from community observation rather than distant adventure. The result gives modern readers both a period story and an example of how two successful women writers shaped questions of obligation, inheritance, and local judgment together.