The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland: Charlotte Gilman

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

`There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will`

Hailed as one of the most distinctive and compelling literary voices of her era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is praised today for her ground-breaking, feminist writing. Collected here, both The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland are extraordinary for scrutinising the patriarchal norms of turn-of-the-century America.

In The Yellow Wallpaper a woman frantically paces the empty nursery at the top of a secluded mansion. Her husband John, a physician, is of no comfort and she can`t bear to sit with the new baby as his crying makes her much too nervous. And then there`s the putrid, yellow wallpaper which seems to shift and creep around the room before her very eyes…

Herland, first published in 1915, follows a group of three men as they arrive in a female-only society. Peace and tranquillity thrive in this utopian land, forcing the explorers to question how their own corrupted, male-dominated world can survive.