Name: Herland, the Yellow Wallpaper, and Selected Writings
ISBN: 9781537030258

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Herland is a utopian women's fiction novel written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915. The genre fiction classic Herland describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis also known as asexual reproduction. The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. Herland is a classic in literature & fiction and genre fiction, it is also an important feminist work. In addition to writing women's fiction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer of social reform. In addition to Herland, this anthology volume also includes The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a semi-autobiographical short story also written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and is considered by many to be her best work.

Herland, the Yellow Wallpaper, 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.

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

Herland was a bit disappointing, but some of the short stories were amazingly written and the poems were incredibly witty!

A collection of powerful and courageous feminist literature by Gilman that makes you reflect the last 100 years of women’s rights movements and how far we have actually come. Sometimes sardonic and satisfyingly funny, sometimes a bit too idealistic, but always thoroughly rational and thorough in challenging the gender stereotypes of its time.

Herland, the Yellow Wallpaper, and Selected Writings

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