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.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land inhabited solely by women; the women reproduce through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Initially skeptical, the explorers come to realize that Herland has evolved into an ideal, cooperative, matriarchal society—fertile, peaceful, and clean—by selectively reproducing the women’s best attributes. As the explorers study Herland culture, they also rethink their own. This edition reproduces the text originally published in The Forerunner in 1915, including several passages omitted from other editions. Stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by Gilman on topics such as birth control, capital punishment, and eugenics provide a rich context for the novel. Materials originally published alongside Herland in 1915, many of which have never before been republished, are also included, as is an excerpt from the sequel, With Her in Ourland.

She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.

The first volume to contain both gothic stories 'The Unwatched Door' and 'Clifford's Tower' since their first publication in 1894. Two great pieces of literature lost until now. Both stories were re-discovered by the filmmakers of The Yellow Wallpaper feature film. This Official Motion Picture book includes an excerpt from the screenplay, as well as integrated film images throughout. The Gothic Collection comprises most of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans' gothic work, with a few cross-over selections.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman's place on its ear, this essay collection studies Gilman's writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space. The contributors present readings of some of Gilman's most significant works. By examining the settings in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman's construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home. Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman's narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman's work that focus on the author's own renouncement of her "natural" role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization. --

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. It features her pioneering feminist masterpiece, her neglected stories contemporary with The Yellow Wall-Paper, and her later explorations of `the woman of fifty'. The introduction to this edition places Gilman in the cultural and historical context of the American divided self, her Beecher heritage, and her contribution to the female Gothic.

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. It was first published in monthly installments as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman between 1909 and 1916, with its sequel, With Her in Ourland beginning immediately thereafter in the January 1916 issue. The book is often considered to be the middle volume in her utopian trilogy; preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed by, With Her in Ourland (1916). It was not published in book form until 1979.

The story details the descent of a young woman into madness. Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after experiencing symptoms of "temporary nervous depression". The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it". She and her husband move into an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery. Her husband chooses for them to sleep there due to its multitude of windows, which provide the air so needed in her recovery. In addition to the couple, John's sister Jennie is present; she serves as their housekeeper. Like most nurseries at the time the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. The narrator attributes all these to children, as most of the damage is isolated to their reach. Ultimately, though, readers are left unsure as to the source of the room's state, leading them to see the ambiguities in the unreliability of the narrator.The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room - its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.After many moments of tension between John and his sister, the story climaxes with the final day in the house. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She excitedly exclaims, "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane", causing her husband to faint as she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the personification of the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.