Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Declaring that her mission was "to find out what ailed society, and how most easily and naturally to improve it," Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was among the vanguard of American first-wave feminists. With Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction, Denise D. Knight, a distinguished Gilman scholar, contributes a much-needed overview and assessment of the writer's short stories. Arguing that Gilman's short fiction is both didactic and utopian in articulating her vision of social reform - that Gilman's stories "re-create the world according to her vision of the ideal" - Knight offers important insights of students and scholars alike. Surveying Gilman's body of stories, this study investigates the early, autobiographical Forerunner and other stories to pinpoint the writer's ideology and advocacy of the principles of nationalism and reform Darwinism; a separate section evaluates "The Yellow Wall-Paper," placing it in the context of Gilman's larger corpus. A sampling of Gilman's own statements about her work, drawn from various autobiographical sources both published and unpublished, follows; augmenting it are the observations of Gilman's friend and professional colleague Amy Wellington. Of particular interest is a collection of salient critical essays, three of them specially commissioned for this study.