The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (review)

When the Feminist Press issued its historic 1973 reprint of “The Yellow Wall-paper,” few could have predicted how thoroughly Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s career would be resurrected over the next four decades. Among other texts, several overlapping collections of her shorter fiction have appeared since then; nearly all of Gilman’s novels and book-length nonfiction studies have been reprinted; and her autobiography has been republished twice, accompanied by a two-volume edition of her diaries. Now Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle—two leading Gilman scholars—have assembled the second major selection of her correspondence to appear during this revival of her work. Meticulously presented and exhaustively annotated, their volume considerably enriches our understanding of the complexities of Gilman’s life, temperament, and intellect.

Drawing upon a wealth of documents from more than two dozen archives, as well as “letters . . . purchased at flea markets and on-line auctions,” the editors are to be applauded for their resourcefulness in locating so much valuable material beyond the principal collection of Gilman papers at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University (p. xxiii). The outcome is an expansive but not unmanageable representation of Gilman’s correspondence—from girlhood to the end of her life—with family members, friends, writers, activists, thinkers, editors, and publishers. The results are so fascinating that the reader wishes the editors had also provided an estimate of the total number of extant Gilman letters from which they made their selection or elaborated upon the criteria—other than “space constraints” and a focus on “the most biographically or historically illuminating” material—that were applied in deciding not only which letters to include but also which passages to excise from those incompletely transcribed (pp. xxiii, xxv). Wisely, the editors have reproduced none of the items excerpted in Mary A. Hill’s 1995 selection of Gilman’s courtship correspondence with her second husband, supplementing it instead with earlier letters to him. On the other hand, the volume silently duplicates several of Gilman’s open-hearted letters to Martha Luther Lane (her chief pre-marital infatuée) published in an unmentioned previous selection.¹ The absence of Gilman’s letters to “Vernon Lee”—whose introduction to, and reviews of, the Italian translation of Women and Economics are cited by Knight and Tuttle—would suggest that additional documents might lie in repositories elsewhere as well.²

One might also quibble with the way in which the editors have arranged the selections. The volume begins and concludes with chapters that proceed in chronological order (up to 1911 and from 1921, respectively) and that surround four chapters divided into the letters to Gilman’s close friend Grace Channing, to her daughter Katharine, to miscellaneous “Famous Correspondents,” and on the topics of “Work, Reform, and Activism.” This shift from sequential to single-recipient to thematic arrangement risks disrupting one’s sense of continuity in Gilman’s pursuit of lifelong personal, professional, and ideological concerns. At the same time, however, if Gilman’s letters to Grace and to Katharine were dispersed throughout a chronologically organized volume rather than separately grouped as they are here, the evolution of these two pivotal relationships could not have been traced so poignantly.

The shape of the volume does not detract at all from its essential value, which lies in the fresh light it sheds on Gilman’s articulation of her stance on numerous issues of abiding urgency: physical culture, dress reform, suffrage, the cult of domesticity, birth control, her idiosyncratic brand of socialism, and what she famously defined as “the sexuo-economic relation” between men and women. There is hardly a matter of interest on which Gilman’s position is not substantially illuminated by these letters. Perhaps most powerfully, they also record her recurrent, enervating struggles with depression, impoverishment, and ostracism, as well as the tension that Gilman experienced between “human life” and “the personal life” (p. 201), between “the general good” or “world’s work...