Fiction · 1915
Herland
Three American men — Vandyck Jennings, Terry Nicholson, and Jeff Margrave — fly into a remote, isolated country and discover a society of women who have lived without men for two thousand years, reproducing by parthenogenesis and raising every child collectively as a matter of civic duty.
Gilman serialized the novel in her own magazine, The Forerunner, in 1915; it was not published in book form until 1979, more than three decades after her death.
Bibliomancer restores the 1915 text exactly as Gilman wrote it.
Contents
- Chapter 1 — A Not Unnatural Enterprise
- Chapter 2 — Rash Advances
- Chapter 3 — A Peculiar Imprisonment
- Chapter 4 — Our Venture
- Chapter 5 — A Unique History
- Chapter 6 — Comparisons Are Odious
- Chapter 7 — Our Growing Modesty
- Chapter 8 — The Girls of Herland
- Chapter 9 — Our Relations and Theirs
- Chapter 10 — Their Religions and Our Marriages
- Chapter 11 — Our Difficulties
- Chapter 12 — Expelled
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1860–1935 · Modern
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, a great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and came to prominence as a lecturer and writer on women's economic independence, most fully argued in Women and Economics (1898). Her best-known story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), grew out of her own experience of the "rest cure" prescribed for postpartum depression; Herland (1915), a utopian novel imagining a society of women living without men, was serialized in The Forerunner, the magazine she wrote and published single-handedly from 1909 to 1916. Diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, she died by suicide in Pasadena, California, in 1935, having long argued in print for the right to choose one's own death rather than endure a terminal illness to its end.
Adjacent records
