Featuring History of Mystery/Detective Fiction and Other Literary Ramblings of Elizabeth Foxwell
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Happy birthday, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for her chilling autobiographical story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), was born today in Hartford in 1860. The great-niece of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman also wrote a single mystery novel, Unpunished (written in 1927, finally published in 1997 by Feminist Press), which I discussed in Jim Huang's They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels (2002). As to the reason Unpunished was not published in Gilman's lifetime (she committed suicide in 1935, due to breast cancer), consider this publisher's assessment: "I find your characters interesting. That is not necessary in a detective story."
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