Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (review)

Thanks to Cynthia J. Davis, scholars, students, and general readers finally have a definitive, authoritative, and comprehensive biography of the often enigmatic Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This much anticipated study of Gilman is, in a word, superb. It joins four other biographies that have been written about the author and lecturer during the past thirty years. Mary A. Hill's Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896 is an eloquent study, but, regrettably, it ends in 1896—two years before the publication of Women and Economics catapulted Gilman into the international spotlight. Gary Scharnhorst's literary biography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is the best of its kind, focusing almost exclusively on the author as a litterateur. Ann J. Lane's To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a useful supplement to Hill's volume, although its thematic construction around key figures in Gilman's life somewhat limits Lane's assessment of the breadth and depth of Gilman's character. And Judith A. Allen's ambitious and eloquent cultural biography, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism, examines, among other things, the role the Progressive Era played in shaping Gilman's complex and sometimes flawed feminism.

Through her autobiography and the previously published biographies, the highlights of Gilman's rather unconventional life are fairly well known. But it is in the lesser-known documents and materials that Davis has found the stuff great biographies are made of. Her meticulously researched volume brings both substance to and new revelations about Gilman's life in a manner that is captivating, thorough, well informed, and inclusive. She explores the various contours, lines, and curves of an extraordinarily complex life in a manner that is precise, eloquent, powerful, and rich. Having dedicated ten years to the research and writing of this study, Davis engages in neither hagiography nor defamation of her subject. Rather, she achieves her objective of "provid[ing] both a thorough account of Gilman's 'life story'" as well as "new insight into the roles available to women vis-à-vis both the public and private spheres at the turn of the last century" (xxi).

This is no easy feat. There are literally thousands upon thousands of pages of material to comb through in the archives of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe Institute, the largest repository of Gilman papers in the world, and in numerous other collections. As Davis notes, Gilman "saved virtually everything, even jottings and doodles" (xxi). But along with manuscripts, letters, and diaries, the odd scribblings and ephemera provide important clues about both Gilman's interior and exterior worlds. Although much of the material in the collections at the Schlesinger and other institutions had already been mined for information by researchers, Davis connects the dots with the kind of painstaking and scrupulous devotion to detail that provided a solid foundation on which she is able to reconstruct—as much as one can—Gilman's various identities: public and private, the rational and sometimes irrational, the dependent and the independent. In addition to interpreting these materials, Davis has located important new documents in places where no one had previously looked.

For example, Davis examined files at the Providence, Rhode Island, Supreme Court, which offered new details about Gilman's divorce from her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, in 1894. Two letters in the court's archives, apparently written by Gilman to support Stetson's divorce petition, make her intentions clear: "My life is too precious to me to waste any more of it like those seven years we spent together. . . . Work I must, and when I live with you I can't. Therefore I shall never live with you again as a wife. . . . I had my work to do before ever I knew you, you know. I am sorry very sorry to put these things so plainly. . . . We two must part" (qtd. in Davis 146-47). Davis also unearthed a...