BIOGRAPHY

Lane, Ann J. To “Herland” and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990, 413 p.

Biography of Gilman that attempts to “understand her inner growth … through the major relationships that gave form to her personality.”

CRITICISM

Bair, Barbara. “Double Discourse: Gilman, Sarton, and the Subversive Text.” In That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Mumford, pp. 187-208. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Examines Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and May Sarton's novel As We Are Now as narratives with features that are “significantly paradigmatic of the basic tenets of theory predominant in feminist literary criticism of the 1970s, theory that stressed the oppression of women and the association of women's secondary status with pathology, deviance, or disease.”

Boone, Joseph Allen. “Centered Lives and Centric Structures in the Novel of Female Community: Counterpointing New Realities in Millennium Hall, Cranford, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and Herland.” In Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction, pp. 278-330. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Discusses Herland as a “Utopian-feminist” novel that “uses humor, positive example, and gentle satire … to undermine the Victorian ideology of love and marriage,” comparing it with works by Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

Golden, Catherine. “The Writing of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Double Palimpsest.” Studies in American Fiction 17, No. 2 (Autumn 1989): 193-201.

Argues that the narrator of Gilman's short story, through her use of language, communicates that “although mad, she is not completely ‘destroyed’ by her patriarchal society.”

Knight, Denise. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997, 234 p.

Surveys Gilman's short stories and reprints essays by and about Gilman.

Additional coverage of Gilman's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 11; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 106, 150; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 221; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Modern American Women Writers; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Reference Guide to American Literature; Reference Guide to Short Fiction; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 13; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1; and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 9, 37.