Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which ascribed gender inequality to women’s economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," which depicts a woman’s descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilman’s later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909–16), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilman’s early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, coedited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 112 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.
