Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems (loa #356)

Description

A definitive edition of the groundbreaking feminist fiction of a nineteenth century pioneer Library of America presents the fullest selection ever of visionary American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman- two novels, forty-four brilliant short stories, nearly two-hundred poems, and both the published and manuscript versions of the landmark story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The short fiction presented here showcases Gilman's mastery of ghost stories, allegorical fantasy, and social realism and includes a virtuoso series of stories written in imitation of the most acclaimed authors of her day. The utopian novels Herland and With Her in Ourland-about a remote and isolated society of women-are pioneering works of speculative fiction and still-incisive commentaries on the politics of gender. Gilman was known to her contemporaries first and foremost as a poet, and this volume brings together her collection In This Our World with more than fifty other poems, many written in support of suffrage and other causes.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, married Charles W. Stetson in 1884. She suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter and separated from her husband in 1888, divorcing him in 1894. After his quick subsequent remarriage, Gilman caused a scandal by sending her daughter to live with her husband and his new wife. In the early 1890s, Gilman began publishing poems and stories, including "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892, and became a lecturer on labor, feminism, reform, and suffrage. In 1898, she published Women and Economics, a call for financial independence for women. In 1900 she married her cousin, George H. Gilman, and the couple moved to New York City. From 1909 to 1916 she wrote, edited, and published the monthly magazine The Forerunner, in which she published most of her work from then on, including What Diantha Did (1910), The Man-Made World (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), and both Herland and With Her in Ourland. With Jane Addams she founded the Woman's Peace Party in 1915. After treatments for cancer failed, she took her own life in 1935.