Penguin 60s Classics

From 'The Marquis of O--', in which a woman is made pregnant without her knowledge, to the vivid and inexplicable suffering portrayed in 'The Earthquake in Chile', his stories are those of a man swimming against the tide of the German Enlightenment, unable to believe in the idealistic humanism of his day, and who sees human nature as irrational, ambiguous and baffling. It is this loss of faith, together with his vulnerability and disequilibrium, his pronounced sense of evil, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carries Kleist more forcefully than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and today.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. In addition to her pioneering masterpiece, 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' (1890), which draws on her own experience of depression and insanity, this edition features her Impress 'story studies', works in the manner of writers such as James, Twain, and Kipling. These stories, together with other fiction from her neglected California period (1890-5), throw new light on Gilman as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In her Forerunner stories she repeatedly explores the situation of the 'woman of fifty' and inspires reform by imagining workable solutions to a range of personal and social problems. The introduction to this edition places Gilman in the cultural and historical context of the American divided self, her Beecher heritage, and her contribution to the female Gothic.

Contains: The kiss -- [Désirée’s Baby][The Story of an Hour]The unexpected -- The godmother.