Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Unpunished.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division

Harvard's Houghton Library recently transitioned from its Oasis catalog to one called Hollis, and one of the goodies I found is the corrected typewritten manuscript of Unpunished, the only mystery novel of feminist icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Unpunished, thought to have been written in the 1920s, was not published until 1997, when the Feminist Press edition was issued.

Happy birthday, Harriet Prescott Spofford.

Harriet Prescott Spofford,
n.d. Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

Poet and writer Harriet Prescott Spofford was born today in Calais, ME, in 1835. A notable figure in mystery fiction for her stories "In a Cellar" (1859), "Mr. Furbush" (1865), and "In the Maguerriwock" (1868) in terms of the development of the professional detective and the mystery story, Spofford published her work in the major periodicals of her day such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazar, and Scribner's Monthly. Her career of more than 60 years also included works of supernatural fiction such as "The Black Bess" (1868), and Spofford's "Her Story" (1872) is considered to be an important precursor to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic feminist work "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892). She died in 1921. (Clues articles on Spofford here and here)

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."