Unapologetic Reviews

One woman's utopia is another man's dystopia. I read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman after hearing about it while I was reading The Yellow Wallpaper , and I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a feminist utopia written in 1915. I'm actually much more familiar with dystopias than utopias. Dystopia is one of my favourite genres, even though I don't read it that often anymore, and I've read most of the classics. So I was curious. What would a feminist writing more than a hundred years ago consider an ideal society for women? At first, Herland sounds pretty great. The story follows three American men who are exploring a remote part of South America when they hear rumours about a mysterious country inhabited entirely by women. They eventually manage to enter this isolated land and discover an advanced civilisation that has existed without men for about two thousand years. And, obviously, the first question is: if there are no men, where are all these women c...

I read The Yellow Wallpaper  by Charlotte Perkins Gilman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #24, "a book about postpartum". This is one of those classics that I think I had encountered before, because I vaguely remember reading an excerpt from it at some point in my life. Either I read it at a point when I was too young to really understand what was happening, or the excerpt simply did not work very well on its own, because I definitely did not remember having much of a reaction to it. Reading the entire story now was a very different experience. And technically, this is not a book at all. It is a short story, first published in 1892, and it is told in the first person through the secret writings of a woman who has recently had a baby and appears to be suffering from what we would now recognise as postpartum depression. What makes the story particularly disturbing is that she is surrounded by people who supposedly know what is best for her. Her husband...