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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. By Cynthia J. Davis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. xxvi + 537 pp. $65. 00/127.95 paper.
Thanks to Cynthia J. Davis, scholars, students, and general readers finally have a definitive, authoritative, and comprehensive biography of the often enigmatic Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This much anticipated study of Gilman is, in a word, superb. It joins four other biographies that have been written about the author and lecturer during the past thirty years. Mary A. Hill's Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896 is an eloquent study, but, regrettably, it ends in 1896 - two years before the publication of Women and Economics catapulted Gilman into the international spotlight. Gary Scharnhorst's literary biography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is the best of its kind, focusing almost exclusively on the author as a litterateur. Ann J. Lane's To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a useful supplement to Hill's volume, although its thematic construction around key figures in Gilman's life somewhat limits Lane's assessment of the breadth and depth of Gilman's character. And Judith A. Allen's ambitious and eloquent cultural biography, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism, examines, among other things, the role the Progressive Era played in shaping Gilman's complex and sometimes flawed feminism.
Through her autobiography and the previously published biographies, the highlights of Gilman's rather unconventional life are fairly well known. But it is in the lesser-known documents and materials that Davis has found the...