About the Author:
Denise D. Knight is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland.Jennifer S. Tuttle is Dorothy M. Healy Chair and Associate Professor of English at the University of New England.
From The Washington Post:
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Charlotte Perkins Gilman may be remembered for only one thing, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), her brilliant story of repression and madness. But boy, is she remembered for it. Generation after generation, editors include the story in anthologies of ghost stories, collections of feminist writings and plain old treasure-troves of good writing: Its next appearance, in fact, is just around the corner, in the Library of America's two-volume "American Fantastic Tales," coming out this fall. Now, in "The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," readers can get to know the mercurial Gilman more intimately. Born in 1860 in Hartford, Conn., Gilman, according to the editors, was "raised in genteel poverty by an emotionally distant mother (her father left the family during her youth)." Her way of coping was to "cultivate a decidedly independent spirit that masked her private pain." Gilman went on to divorce her first husband in an age when that maneuver was subject to marked criticism, suffered a nervous breakdown, seems to have had a passionate relationship with a woman and eventually carried out her belief in euthanasia (she was suffering from cancer). But early in her career, awaiting the publication of her incomparable tale, she let out this burst of enthusiasm in a letter to her passionate friend: "When my awful story, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' comes out, you must try & read it. Walter say he has read it four times, and thinks it the most ghastly tale he ever read. Says it beats Poe! . . . But that's only a husband's opinion."
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