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The author wrote "A New England Nun" to help show how women were treated and viewed during that time period, people have to do things they don't want to in order to live their lives how they want to. The story reflects how some women live lives they don't want to until they can break the sexist cycle.

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Louisa is still expected to do all the womanly duties, (sew, clean, cook, etc). Even after she got her heart broken, she still needs to keep order in her life. "Louisa's artistic expression is only possible if she gives up the world.
On the other hand, the state of being isolated (which we can also read as a state of valuing the self over others) is the only distinction between what Louisa embraces and what she relinquishes. Paradoxically. Louisa's talents can be manifested only in an exaggerated form of the very domesticity she appears to have rejected." (Harris 2). Louisa has to give up everything g to express herself as a woman and a feminist. This story helps us to understand the hardships of being different and being a woman in 1891.

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"Louisa sat there in a daze, listening to their retreating steps. After a while she got up and slunk softly home herself. The next day she did her housework methodically; that was as much a matter of course as breathing; but she did not sew on her wedding-clothes." (Freeman 12).

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Louisa was different from everyone else, and she prefers it that way. Throughout the story, she is always looked at differently by everyone for doing things differently; "In Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's widely anthologized story "A New England Nun," Louisa Ellis comes to realize that she much prefers the life she has made for herself- a solitary life obsessively devoted to domestic routine -to the one she would have if she married Joe Dagget, to whom she has been engaged for fifteen years." (Harris 1).

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“Louisa used china every day -- something which none of her neighbors did. They whispered about it among themselves. Their daily tables were laid with common crockery, their sets of best china stayed in the parlor closet, and Louisa Ellis was no richer nor better bred than they. Still she would use the china.” (Freeman 2).