Herland and the Yellow Wallpaper (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

This volume pairs two of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous works, Herland (1915) and "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892). Herland, a utopian novel, sketches Gilman's model of a society governed, inhabited, and perpetuated solely by women; while "The Yellow Wallpaper," typically categorized as a Gothic or horror story, dramatizes a young wife's postpartum descent into madness. These powerful examples of Gilman's fiction illuminate, perhaps even more effectively than her nonfiction, the complexity and passion of her mission for egalitarianism among the sexes. Reading these works today also helps us to define the scope of Gilman's progressiveness, revealing how far we have come as well as how far we have yet to travel to make true equality a requisite condition of human life.