In the Library
Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 52k words
£1.99
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About the book
Three American men hack their way into a mountain valley somewhere in South America and find a country of women, two thousand years old, who long ago lost their men and learned to reproduce without them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman serialized this short novel in 1915 in her own magazine, The Forerunner, where she also published The Yellow Wallpaper a generation earlier. The explorers expect catfights, jealousy, hysteria; they find foresters and engineers, a culture organised around motherhood as civic vocation rather than private fate. Gilman uses the explorers' bewilderment as her instrument, letting Vandyck and Terry and Jeff stand in for every assumption her century made about what women required. The utopia is cool, rational, slightly chilly, and it knows itself.