Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) penned this sardonic remark in her autobiography, encapsulating a lifetime of frustration with the gender-based double standard that prevailed in turn-of-the-century America. With her slyly humorous novel, Herland (1915), she created a fictional utopia where not only is face powder obsolete, but an all-female population has created a peaceful, progressive, environmentally-conscious country from which men have been absent for two thousand years. Gilman was enormously prolific, publishing five hundred poems, two hundred short stories, hundreds of essays, eight novels, and seven years' worth of her monthly magazine, The Forerunner. She emerged as one of the key figures in the women's movement of her day, advocating equality of the sexes, the right of women to work, and socialized child care, among other issues. Today Gilman is perhaps best known for the chilling depiction of a woman's mental breakdown in her unforgettable short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper". This Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes both this landmark work and Herland, together with a selection of Gilman's major short stories and her poems.

Herland, The Yellow Wall-paper, and Selected Writings

Gemma

"We do not know," said he. "Some say it is from a moment's delay in action of one-half of the brain. I cannot tell. To me it is more mysterious, more interesting, to think that when one has that wonderful sudden sense of previous acquaintance it means vague memories of a former life." And he looked at Ellen as if she had figured largely in his previous existence.

Herland, The Yellow Wall-paper, and Selected Writings quotes

Join the club