Audiobook · read by volunteers
Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
Read by Heather Ordover, Elizabeth Klett, Leon Mire · 12 chapters · 5 h 34
About the book
Three young American men, each with his own temperament and his own opinions about women, hear rumours of a hidden land, high in the mountains, where only women are said to live. They set out to find it, and they do. There they discover a country that has no men, no war and no crime, and a society that seems stranger and, perhaps, better than their own.
The inhabitants of Herland have a long history and a complex civilisation, and they question their guests with polite and unrelenting curiosity. What do the visitors think about family, work, education and the role of women? Their answers, and the ways in which they fail to understand what they find, are a source of both comedy and reflection.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this utopian novel in 1915. It is lively, thought-provoking and still surprisingly modern in the questions it asks. Twelve chapters, around five and a half hours. A listen that will start conversations.
Introduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American writer and social reformer who campaigned for women’s economic independence and wrote widely on gender, work and family. She is perhaps best known for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892, but she wrote many essays, poems and novels. Herland, published in serial form in her magazine The Forerunner in 1915, is her best-known utopian work and was followed by a sequel, With Her in Ourland.
The novel belongs to the tradition of utopian fiction, in which an imaginary society is described in order to criticise the real one. Gilman’s narrator is one of three male visitors, and the story is told through his eyes, which allows her to show how a society organised around cooperation, motherhood and education might appear to outsiders accustomed to a very different order. The result is a mixture of satire, social theory and adventure, written in a light and sometimes humorous style.
The book was largely forgotten for decades and rediscovered in the 1970s, when feminist scholars and readers brought it back into print. It has since become a regular text in courses on utopian literature and gender studies. Readers will find that some of its ideas, particularly those relating to heredity and social planning, reflect the assumptions of its era and can be uncomfortable to modern ears.
This recording has twelve chapters and runs for about five and a half hours, read by LibriVox volunteers. It is a quick, thought-provoking listen, and it shows how early twentieth-century writers imagined alternatives to the world they knew.
Public domain
Charlotte Perkins Gilman died in 1935: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text