Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 


This volume pairs two of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most famous works,
Herland (1915) and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Herland, a utopian novel, sketches Gilman’s model of a society governed, inhabited, and perpetuated solely by women; while ‘The Yellow Wallpaper, ‘ typically categorized as a Gothic or horror story, dramatizes a young wife’s postpartum descent into madness. These powerful examples of Gilman’s fiction illuminate, perhaps even more effectively than her nonfiction, the complexity and passion of her mission for egalitarianism among the sexes. Reading these works today also helps us to define the scope of Gilman’s progressiveness, revealing how far we have come as well as how far we have yet to travel to make true equality a requisite condition of human life.

 

About the author

From the 1890s until her death in 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman stood as one of the most important and tireless advocates for women’s rights in America. She wrote, lectured, and published her own magazine, often while struggling as a single mother and working woman when neither was socially acceptable.