New Textual Discoveries and Recovered Passages in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland

Many readers first encountered Herland (1915) with Ann J. Lane’s 1979 Pantheon edition, described on the cover as “A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’”¹ The description is apt, not least because Lane’s edition performed the essential service of reintroducing this important work, which had never been published as a stand-alone volume. It had originally appeared serially over the twelve months of the 1915 volume of Gilman’s self-published journal The Forerunner, but Gilman had not seen fit to issue it in book form as she had many of her nonfiction works.² Despite its inarguable importance, however, the Pantheon edition was flawed. Lane heavily “corrected” Gilman’s text, changing spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and even some diction; altering syntax; and inadvertently omitting several brief portions of the novel. Unfortunately, this flawed version of the novel has become the copytext for most subsequent editions, including inexpensive editions like those issued by Dover Press or the Signet Classics series and e-texts available on Kindle and through the University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center.

Denise D. Knight’s 1999 Penguin edition corrected many of the errors that had entered the Pantheon edition, most importantly recovering three full sentences and several words that were previously lost in transcription. Knight retained more of the 1915 serialized edition’s stylistic idiosyncrasies though she, too, made “minor editorial emendations to enhance readability.”³ Despite her obvious care, however, Knight inadvertently overlooked four passages from Gilman’s original.

In putting together my own edition of “Herland” and Related Writings (2013) for Broadview Press, I returned to The Forerunner serialization of the novel and, with the help of two assistants, Lynsey Kamine and Nelle Smith, collated it with Knight’s and Lane’s editions.⁴ In the process we found the four lost passages, recovered the brief synopses with which Gilman began many of the early numbers of the novel, identified several more lost words, and revisited the book’s accidentals (spelling, punctuation, and capitalization). Gilman was sole author and editor of The Forerunner and thus had complete editorial control though by the same token, she was inevitably rushed and lacked the professional editorial assistance other authors enjoyed. With these facts in mind, I attempted in my edition to reproduce Gilman’s spelling, punctuation, italics, paragraph breaks, and so on, even in cases of inconsistency or error. In nearly every case, I retained the sometimes idiosyncratic usage in The Forerunner text, correcting only the most obvious errors, such as the misspelling of a word or character’s name that is spelled correctly in all other instances.

What do the corrections in Knight’s edition and my own provide readers that they would miss if they only read the Pantheon edition or one based upon it? The synopses, of course, help readers to imagine the experience of encountering the novel as a serial and tell us what Gilman thought essential for readers to know at each stage. Some of the recovered words and accidentals simply reveal vagaries of Gilman’s style; some recovered sentences reinforce themes already apparent in those parts of the novel that have been available since 1979. But a few of the discoveries introduce new allusions and interpretive issues.

Among the accidentals of Gilman’s serialized version that I have reinstated are her numerous uses of a punctuation structure common in late Victorian fiction but unused today—the comma plus dash combination— seen for example in this sentence: “As for us,—three young men to a whole landful of women—what could we do?” (p. 76). Additionally, where Lane’s edition replaced some semicolons with commas and subsequent editors followed suit, I have recovered Gilman’s semicolons, as in this sentence: “It was not a very comfortable place, not at all easy to get at; just a sort of crevice high up along the steep bank; but it was well veiled with foliage and dry” (p. 66). I have also retained Gilman’s occasional breezy comma splices. For example, the following passage, describing...