The Yellow Wallpaper / Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The nameless narrator and her physician husband move into a grand colonial manor where endless rest and relaxation are prescribed to cure her nervous disposition.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a beguiling short story of one woman’s declining mental health. This edition is introduced by journalist and author, Lucy Mangan. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. It is an important early feminist work that brings forward complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism.Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s caustic wit and progressive views on feminism and mental health are powerfully showcased in these two works, The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland. The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which exists an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). They were believed to be prone to many “nervous conditions” and particularly hysteria. Women were patronized and treated as mentally weak and fragile. In her best-known work, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman writes about different kinds of oppression that women were exposed to at the time. Despite that, Gilman spent a lot of time in the local library studying ancient civilizations on her own. To prevent her children from getting hurt as she had been, her mother forbade them to make strong friendships or read fiction. Her schooling was erratic, and she attended seven different schools in just four years, finishing when she was 15. Since her mother was not able to support the family, her aunts played a big part in her upbringing. When she was a child, her father abandoned his wife and children, and she spent the rest of her childhood in poverty. You may of course skip all of it and go straight to the main title if you do not want any spoilers and come back later to the beginning.Ĭharlotte Perkins was born in 1860 in Connecticut. A study of the themes present in The Yellow Wallpaper, Herland, and The Crux

The Yellow Wallpaper / Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman