Growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then a miracle happened - one of these young women bore a child. The explanation for 2,000 years of ongoing procreation comes a third of the way through the novel, where a chapter is dedicated to the history.Īfter escaping slavery in a harem and having “no-one left on this beautiful high garden land but a bunch of hysterical girls and some older slave women” there followed a decade of working together,

The men scamper through the landscape, armed and dangerous, fuelled by the promise of lusty adventures and thoughts of fending off the men they know must be hidden somewhere, as they have seen babies and children on their flyover.īut there are no men. “They won’t find this in a hurry,” says Terry, even though the women had run out of their houses and watched them fly over: this is one of many subtle digs by the author foreshadowing the way the men underestimate the intelligence of the women. They take a small aircraft to map the forest, landing on a wide rock “quite out of sight of the interior”. Soon after their first journey, the men return so they are not beaten to “the good lookers” in “the bunch” by some other fellows. When their guides tell them about Herland, an isolated country devoid of men, they are keen to go and try their luck with the women Terry aims to be “king of Ladyland”. Nicholson who bankrolls the trip and Jeff Margrave, a smarmy doctor – who are on an adventure holiday into the wilderness of a continent resembling South America. The novel is narrated by Vandyck Jennings, a sociologist out to learn all he can, and one of three men – alongside wealthy American Terry O.

If not for the foresight of the feminist publisher, it might well have languished for more decades. The book was published as a full-length work for the first time in 1979 by London based The Women’s Press Ltd. This is an extraordinary output for a single writer in any circumstances or era. Perkins Gilman was an influential suffragette in America, and Herland was originally published as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a monthly journal edited and written entirely by her for seven years. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute Charlotte Perkins Gilman photographed around 1915, when she wrote and published Herland.

Herland 1915