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Where to start reading the Penguin Little Black Classics

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9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

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Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

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9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

The Yellow Wall-Paper

'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.' 
 
Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Gilman's work is available in Penguin Classics in The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland and Selected Writings.

'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing' 
 
Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do.

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. In 1884 she married Charles Water Stetson. After giving birth, Charlotte sank into a deep depression. She entered a sanitarium in Philadelphia to undergo the 'rest cure', a controversial treatment, which forbade any type of physical activity or intellectual stimulation. 1892, she published the now-famous story 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'. In 1898, her most famous nonfiction book, Women and Economics, was published. With its publication, and 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. 
 
Denise D. Knight is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Courtland, 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.

Wonderfully sardonic and slyly humorous, the writings of landmark American feminist and socialist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman were penned in response to her frustrations with the gender-based double standard that prevailed in America as the twentieth century began. Perhaps best known for her chilling depiction of a woman's mental breakdown in her unforgettable 1892 short story 'The Yellow Wall-Paper', Gilman also wrote Herland, a wry novel that imagines a peaceful, progressive country from which men have been absent for 2,000 years. Both are included in this volume, along with a selection of Gilman's major short stories and her poems.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Connecticut. She was a feminist and journalist and author of a number of fiction and non-fiction works. These include Women and Economics (1898), Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) and Herland (1915). She is best remembered for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ which describes the descent of a woman into madness following a ‘rest cure’. Unconventional in many ways, Gilman’s life included two marriages and separation from her nine-year-old daughter, whom she sent to live with her ex-husband and his new wife. She was a Suffragette, a public speaker on social issues and the editor of a number of literary magazines during her career. In 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer and, as an advocate of euthanasia, she took the decision to commit suicide. She did this on 17 August 1935 by taking an overdose of chloroform.

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women’s weird fiction. 
 
'The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.' 
 
In the throes of a ‘temporary nervous depression’ following childbirth, a woman is brought by her physician husband to recuperate in an isolated New England mansion. There she is barred from her work of writing, denied any visits to friends, and encouraged to simply get better. Sequestered in the old nursery at the top of the house, with barred windows and a bed nailed to the floor, she has little to do but examine the strange wallpaper that surrounds her – and appears to shift before her very eyes. 
 
This is the tale of a woman driven to the brink and beyond. Here accompanied by Gilman’s key wider stories, The Yellow Wallpaper endures as a groundbreaking, deeply disturbing classic of feminist horror. 
 
'A great work of literature, the product of a questing, burning intellect' Maggie O’Farrell 
 
The Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS series ventures into the dark heart of the uncanny with disturbing, and disturbed, protagonists who dare to defy the norm. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lindy West

This is a Utopian novel by a feminist set in the Amazon rainforest - and it is funny... Prepare for a feminist lecture, but one that does not lose sight of the need to entertain

Prolific, ambitious, and deeply earnest in her desire to make the world more just for women, Gilman's long career as a speaker and writer inspired countless women to work for change. Her status as one of the most important feminist thinkers of the Progressive Era is undeniable

It was so radical that more than 50 years passed before society began to catch up with its feminism.

What would happen if society was run by women? Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagines the result... 
 
When three American men discover a community of women, living in perfect isolation in the Amazon, they decide there simply must be men somewhere. How could these women survive without man's knowledge, experience and strength, not to mention reproductive power? In fact, what they have found is a civilisation free from disease, poverty and the weight of tradition. All alone, the women have created a society of calm and prosperity, a feminist utopia that dares to threaten the very concept of male superiority. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LINDY WEST

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Praise for Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper

This is a Utopian novel by a feminist set in the Amazon rainforest - and it is funny... Prepare for a feminist lecture, but one that does not lose sight of the need to entertain

Prolific, ambitious, and deeply earnest in her desire to make the world more just for women, Gilman's long career as a speaker and writer inspired countless women to work for change. Her status as one of the most im ...

It was so radical that more than 50 years passed before society began to catch up with its feminism.

This is a Utopian novel by a feminist set in the Amazon rainforest - and it is funny... Prepare for a feminist lecture, but one that does not lose sight of the need to entertain

Prolific, ambitious, and deeply earnest in her desire to make the world more just for women, Gilman's long career as a speaker and writer inspired countless women to work for change. Her status as one of the most im ...

It was so radical that more than 50 years passed before society began to catch up with its feminism.

This is a Utopian novel by a feminist set in the Amazon rainforest - and it is funny... Prepare for a feminist lecture, but one that does not lose sight of the need to entertain

Prolific, ambitious, and deeply earnest in her desire to make the world more just for women, Gilman's long career as a speaker and writer inspired countless women to work for change. Her status as one of the most im ...

It was so radical that more than 50 years passed before society began to catch up with its feminism.

Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Series by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Weird Girls

Articles featuring Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Where to start reading the Penguin Little Black Classics

9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

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