Known primarily for her classic and haunting story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an enormously influential American feminist and sociologist. Her early-twentieth-century writings continue to inspire writers and activists today. This collection includes selections from both her fiction and nonfiction work. In addition to the title story, there are seven short stories collected here that combine humor, anger, and startling vision to suggest how women's "place" in society should be changed to benefit all. The nonfiction selections are from Gilman's The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture and her masterpiece, Women And Economics, which was translated into seven languages and established her international reputation as a theorist. Also included in a delightful excerpt from Gilman's utopian novel, Herland, an acidly funny tale about three American male explorers who stumble into an all-female society and begin their odyssey by insisting, "This is a civilized country . . . there must be men." Gilman's analyses of economic and women's issues are as incisive and relevant today as they were upon their original publication. This volume is an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover a powerful American writer.

Collected fiction and essays by a pillar of the American feminist canon—with an introduction by Halle Butler, a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, editor, and journalist whose poems, articles, short stories, and novels had a single focus: equality for women. Although best known for “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” her spine-chilling takedown of the “rest cure” prescribed for postpartum depression, Gilman spent her life advocating for a woman’s right to an education, to creative self-expression and economic self-sufficiency, and an end to the consumerism that blinded women to the ways that society held them back. This collection brings together Gilman’s best-known work with her lesser-known satirical short stories to provide an overarching introduction to this relentless ideologue. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story first published in January 1892. The psychological thriller by the renowned US women’s rights writer and campaigner is an autobiographical-inspired novella based upon her own experience of severe postnatal depression, leading to post-natal psychosis. At the time, women with PND (known in America as postpartum depression) were seen as hysterical and were often dismissed by doctors who overlooked treatment options through lack of understanding of the condition. In Perkins’ short story, written tellingly from the first-person perspective, the nameless female protagonist is forced to sleep in an attic with yellow wallpaper and is driven mad by her enforced imprisonment following the birth of her first child. The book describes in detail how she sees imagined beings and ghostly sightings in the house. Disturbing in its nature yet utterly realistic to the heroine, the protagonist offers a diary-style narrative detailing her experience as a new mother suffering with severe mental illness: "I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief." Evoking gothic themes of Charlotte Bronte’s 'Jane Eyre', in both Jane Eyre’s own tortuous and notorious Red Room and Bertha Mason's confinement in her loft prison, the book was made into a film in 2011 – directed by Logan Thomas and starring Aric Cushing and Juliet Landau. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was born on 3rd July 1860 in Connecticut, USA. Her early family life was troubled, with her father abandoning his wife and family; a move which strongly influenced her feminist political leanings and advocator of women’s rights. After jobs as a tutor and painter, Perkins – a self- declared humanist and ‘tom boy’ – began to work as a writer of short stories, novels, non-fiction pieces and poetry. Her best known work is her semi-autobiographical short story, inspired by her post-natal depression, entitled ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ which was published in 1892 and made into a film in 2011. A member of the American National Women's Hall of Fame, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a strong believer that "the domestic environment oppressed women through the patriarchal beliefs upheld by society". A believer in euthanasia, she was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer in January 1932 and chose to take her own life in August 1935, writing in her suicide note that she "chose chloroform over cancer".

This sourcebook combines extracts from contemporary documents and critical reviews, providing an introduction, a publishing and critical history, a chronology of key events, a guide to further reading and original pictures.

The focus of Carol Farley Kessler's work is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman developed as a writer and how she imagined a full-blown utopia for women. This book, which offers a fresh reading of Gilman's fiction, fills a void in Gilman scholarship, in feminist utopian scholarship, and in American literary studies. Kessler provides three journeys through Gilman's life: "A Biographical Exploration'' discusses facets of her life having a substantial impact upon her utopian writing. Four themes influence this development: the legacy of ancestral expectations; her relationships to father, mother, and daughter; the experience of two marriages and a divorce; and her friendships with women. Gilman and her "Prancing Young Utopia" presents three stages in the development of Gilman's utopian writing. First, she imagined neighborhoods-writing alternately fiction and nonfiction. Second, she tested in fiction the expression of utopian principles explained in her nonfiction. Finally, she created the whole society in her 1915 satire Herland. All of the foregoing writing represents Gilman's effort to imagine in fiction solutions that she recommended in her 1898 feminist treatise, Women and Economics. "Writing to Empower Living'' connects Gilman's biography to her utopian writing as both personal expression and public activism. The writing can be understood as "equipment for living." Ten hard-to-locate utopian short stories and chapters from four novels conclude the volume.

A Companion to the American Short Story traces thedevelopment of this versatile literary genre over the past 200years. Sets the short story in context, paying attention to theinteraction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles Contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon,with close attention to the achievements of women writers as wellas such important genres as the ghost story and detectivefiction Embraces diverse traditions including African-American,Jewish-American, Latino, Native-American, and regional short storywriting Includes a section focused on specific authors and texts, fromEdgar Allen Poe to John Updike

A comprehensive bibliography of books and short fiction published in the English language.

The focus of this essay collection is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopianism.

As a companion volume to St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, this volume concentrates "on those types of fiction which may be labelled as horror novels, dark fantasies, ghost stories, gothic novels, tales of terror, supernatural fictions, occult fantasies, black-magic stories, psychological thrillers, tales of unease, "grand-guignol" shockers, creepy stories, shudder-pulp fictions, "contes cruels," uncanny stories, macabre fictions and weird tales."--Editor's note, p. ix.