The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

24 June 2021
9781529042320
240 pages

Synopsis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s progressive views on feminism and mental health are powerfully showcased in her two most famous stories. The Yellow Wallpaper skillfully charts one woman's struggle with depression whilst Herland is an entertaining imagining of an all female utopia.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by journalist and author Lucy Mangan.

Confined to her attic bedroom and isolated from her newborn baby, the nameless narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper keeps a secret diary in which she records the sprawling and shifting patterns of the room’s lurid yellow wallpaper as she slowly sinks into madness. This chilling story is based on the author’s own experience of depression. In Herland, a trio of men set out to discover an all-female community rumoured to be hidden deep in the jungle. What they find surprises them all; they’re captured by women who, for two thousand years, have lived in a peaceful and prosperous utopia without men.

The Yellow Wallpaper by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman created feminist fireworks the moment it appeared in the January 1892 edition of the New England Magazine
Gilman wrote her story about husbands, the medical profession and the patriarchy at large shaping and suppressing women’s lives and freedoms 126 years ago. It was only in 2015 that we got a name and a crime – coercive control – for most of what her heroine experiences