Abstract
The three authors who are the subjects of this book, Kate Chopin (1850–1904), Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), were prolific and innovative short-story writers. All three wrote short stories throughout their professional lives and were also practitioners in other genres; all wrote poetry, for private and public consumption, both Gilman and Wharton wrote novels, criticism, autobiography, essays and cultural critiques, Wharton wrote travel books and Gilman had a long and distinguished career as a sociologist, lecturing and writing outside the academic establishment to a wide range of different audiences. Chopin, the most dedicated short story writer of the three, wrote a few minor articles and was the author of three novels: one, Young Dr Gosse, was destroyed after she failed to find a publisher for it, another, At Fault, was published at her own expense in 18901 and her third and best known, The Awakening, was published in 1899, toward the end of her life.
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Notes
Toth, Emily Kate Chopin (London: Century, 1990), p. 189.
Showalter, Elaine ‘Smoking Room’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 1995, p. 12.
Actually the title of a book by Gilman, The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton Co., 1911).
Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton (London: Constable & Co., 1975), p. 61.
The publication date of the story is the subject of some confusion among scholars. In her book, The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (New York The Feminist Press, 1992), Catherine Golden explains the reasons for the misdating of the story’s first publication and arrives at January 1892 as the true date of its appearance in the New England Magazine. See also Julie Bates Dock et al. in ‘But One Expects That”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship’, PMLA, Vol. 111, 1, January 1996, pp. 52–65, for a scathing appraisal of the inaccuracies — textual and otherwise — that have dogged the critical treatment of Gilman’s tale.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1935 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 119.
See Larzer Ziff’s discussion of the ideological imperatives of those in charge at the literary magazines at the turn of the century in his The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), pp. 123–4.
Chopin, Kate The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 717–18.
White, Barbara A. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), p. 28.
Lewis, R.W.B. & Nancy Lewis (eds). The Letters of Edith Wharton (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 124.
Wharton, Edith The Writing of Fiction (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 37.
Wharton, Edith The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), p. 2.
Wharton, Edith A Backward Glance (New York: 1934; rpt. London: Constable & Co., 1972), p. 207.
Seyersted, Per & Emily Toth (eds) A Kate Chopin Miscellany (Nachitoches: Northwestern State University Press, 1979), pp. 120–1.
Berthoff, Warner American Trajectories: Authors and Readings 1790–1970 (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), p. 70.
See Helen Taylor’s discussion of local color and its contingencies in her book, Gender, Race and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 15–22.
Jones, Anne Goodwyn Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 153.
See also Ryu, Chung-Eun ‘The Negro as a Serious Subject in Kate Chopin’s Fiction’, English Language and Literature, Vol. 36, (4), 1990, pp. 659–78 for a discussion of the differences in relations between black and white in Chopin’s Louisiana as compared to other Southern States and how these differences are reflected in the fiction.
Bell, Michael Davitt The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 171.
Hill, Mary A. The Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900, (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 196.
Cranny-Francis, Anne Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (London: Polity Press, 1990), p. 6.
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© 1997 Janet Beer
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Beer, J. (1997). Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction — An Introduction. In: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26015-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26015-7_1
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