Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements Introduction HERLAND CHAPTER I - A Not Unnatural Enterprise CHAPTER II - Rash Advances CHAPTER III - A Peculiar Imprisonment CHAPTER IV - Our Venture CHAPTER V - A Unique History CHAPTER VI - Comparisons Are Odious CHAPTER VII - Our Growing Modesty CHAPTER VIII - The Girls of Herland CHAPTER IX - Our Relations and Theirs CHAPTER X - Their Religions and Our Marriages CHAPTER XI - Our Difficulties CHAPTER XII - Expelled SHORT FICTION The Unexpected The Giant Wistaria An Extinct Angel The Yellow Wall-Paper'' The Rocking-Chair Through This The Boys and The Butter Mrs. Beazley''s Deeds Turned Old Water Making a Change Mrs. Elder''s Idea The Chair of English Bee Wise His Mother Dr. Clair''s Place Joan''s Defender The Vintage The Unnatural Mother POETRY One Girl of Many In Duty Bound On the Pawtuxet She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping An Obstacle Similar Cases A Conservative A Moonrise Too Much To the Young Wife Birth Seeking Closed Doors The Purpose Locked Inside The Artist More Females of the Species Matriatism EXPLANATORY AND TEXTUAL NOTES PENGUIN CLASSICS THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER, HERLAND, AND SELECTED WRITINGS CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) was born in New England, a descendant of the prominent and influential Beecher family. Despite the affluence of her famous ancestors, she was born into poverty. Her father abandoned the family when she was a child, and she received just four years of formal education. At an early age she vowed never to marry, hoping instead to devote her life to public service. In 1882, however, at the age of twenty-one, she was introduced to Charles Walter Stetson (1858-1911), a handsome Providence, Rhode Island, artist, and the two were married in 1884.

Charlotte Stetson became pregnant almost immediately after their marriage, gave birth to a daughter, and sank into a deep depression that lasted for several years. She eventually entered a sanitarium in Philadelphia to undergo the "rest cure," a controversial treatment for nervous prostration, which forbade any type of physical activity or intellectual stimulation. After a month, she returned to her husband and child and subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1888, she left Stetson and moved with her daughter to California, where her recovery was swift. In the early 1890s, she began a career in writing and lecturing, and in 1892, she published the now-famous story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." A volume of poems, In This Our World, followed a year later. In 1894, she relinquished custody of her young daughter to her ex-husband and endured public condemnation for her actions. In 1898, her most famous nonfiction book, Women and Economics, was published.

With its publication, and its subsequent translation into seven languages, Gilman earned international acclaim. In 1900, she married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. Over the next thirty-five years, she wrote and published hundreds of stories and poems and more than a dozen books, including Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Human Work (1904), The Man Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), With Her in Ourland (1916), His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (1923), and The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935). From 1909 to 1916 she singlehandedly wrote, edited, and published her own magazine, The Forerunner, in which the utopian romance Herland first appeared. In 1932, Gilman learned that she had inoperable breast cancer. Three years later, at the age of seventy-five, she committed suicide, intending her death to demonstrate her advocacy of euthanasia. In 1993, Gilman was named in a poll commissioned by the Siena Research Institute as the sixth most influential woman of the twentieth century. In 1994, she was inducted posthumously into the National Women''s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

DENISE D. KNIGHT is professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland, where she specializes in nineteenth-century American Literature. She is author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction and editor of The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. She is also the author of numerous articles, essays, and reviews on nineteenth-century American writers. Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen''s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England This collection under the title Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings first published in Penguin Books 1999 This edition published 2009 Introduction and notes copyright © Denise D. Knight, 1999 All rights reserved eISBN : 978-1-101-14502-9 CIP data available The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author''s rights is appreciated. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my appreciation to Kristine Puopolo, my editor at Penguin Books, for her commitment to this project and for her guidance and thoughtful suggestions. I am also grateful to Gretchen M. Gogan in the interlibrary loan department at the State University of New York at Cortland for cheerfully and promptly responding to my requests for assistance.

Gary Scharnhorst deserves recognition for his early work on Gilman and particularly for compiling Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography (1985), an indispensable resource for Gilman scholars. Most of all, I thank my husband, Michael K. Barylski, for his ongoing love, support, encouragement, and interest in my work on Gilman. INTRODUCTION Near the end of her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) sardonically remarks that "This is the woman''s century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place, . to remake humanity, to rebuild the suffering world--and the world waits while she powders her nose."1 Frustrated both by women who transformed themselves into sex objects for the pleasure of men and by society''s gender-based double standard, Gilman created a fictional utopia, Herland (1915), where such frivolous items as face powder would be obsolete. Indeed, not only is Herland devoid of feminine vanity of any kind, its all-female inhabitants have created a peaceful, progressive, environmentally conscious country from which men have been absent for two thousand years. Rather than suffering deprivation, the women have thrived.

Herland depicts a healthy, alternative view of women and demonstrates a degree of social reform that Gilman, caught in the conventional trappings of the turn-of-the-century patriarchal society, could envision only in her imagination. Born Charlotte Anna Perkins in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860, Gilman was the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom''s Cabin (1852), and Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned minister. Despite her famous ancestry (her great-grandfather was the distinguished theologian Lyman Beecher), Gilman lived a troubled childhood. After her father abandoned the family, her mother, a part-time day-school teacher, was left to raise two children on her own. With only meager earnings, it was a precarious existence. During her adolescence, Gilman became a passionate rebel, defiantly rejecting the conventional roles deemed appropriate for late-nineteenth-century women. At the age of eighteen, she entered the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied drawing and painting. By the time she was twenty she had decided to devote her life to public service.

Although she had vowed never to marry, in January 1882 she met Rhode Island artist Charles W.