Herland is very much like The Lost World, if you got rid of the dull dinosaurs and murderous cavemen to replace them with a steady state society of three million women reproducing through parthenogenesis, and if you also got rid of the Victorian British men to replace them with three all American boy adventurers, one a man's man macho domineering type, one a southern gentleman who believes in entrapping his women through chivalry and deference, and one Goldilocks warning, actual hair colour may vary character who is our narrator. Both are good pieces of political writing, although I did not feel that either was great from a literary point of view.

But who reads dystopian literature for the story, (and Herland is dystopian particularly for dog lovers, but for them and everybody else on account of the racism, which perhaps rather invalidates the feminism in that you could read it as Gilman suggesting a just, well functioning, stable and happy all female society is possible, so long as all the women are pure bred Aryans). This is a mismatched selection, the Yellow wallpaper is about twenty pages long and is the better of the two from a literary point of view, Herland is just short of two hundred pages and is one of those books more interesting to read about than to read and I must impress upon you books that are more interesting to read about than to read, are always more interesting to read about than to read, even if you take that into account, it is not exactly a dud, but is a classic example of Utopian (dystopian) fiction in that the author is more interested in the concept to the exclusion of the story.

Herland novel