Benigna Machiavelli - Softcover

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 153903156X ISBN 13: 9781539031567

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

WHEN I was a very young girl I heard a New Year's Prayer given by our minister, the Rev. William V. Cutter, a liberal and a learned man, with a great command of language. He was sort of intoning, as people do in prayer — and, by the way, how do Christian ministers reconcile it with their consciences to pray so when the Bible distinctly forbids us to make long prayers in public? But they do make 'em, and this one went droning along with "Thou knowest" this, and "Thou knowest" that, to fill in. It used to puzzle me a good deal, these "Thou Knowests," for I was always taught it was vulgar to say "you now" all the time in conversation, and I couldn't see why it was any better in King James' English man Queen Victoria's. "Thou knowest, O Lord," he went on in a sort of chant, "how many good resolutions we made a year ago to-day, and how we have broken them all; how many noble determinations we recorded, and how utterly we have failed to keep them."

About this title

About the Author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins on July 3,1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. She died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California. Her death was a suicide by chloroform, a decision she made as a result of a breast cancer diagnosed as fatal. In an article regarding suicide, she had written that it was “an insult to allow death in pitiful degradation.” As in so many things, Gilman was ahead of her time in her views on euthanasia. Although this particular article was written knowing she was going to take her life, she had addressed the subject of suicide long before. Lyman Beecher was her great grandfather on her paternal side, and she was influenced by this remarkable family’s progressive ideas and attitudes. When her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, left his family with little to no financial support, her mother, Mary Fitch Wescott Perkins, had few alternatives; she needed to rely on the charity of relatives, which included the Beechers. As a child, Gilman was visited by her great aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher, the latter widely known in America at the time for having defined “a new role for women within the household.” Gilman was sought out and respected by George Bernard Shaw, who asked her to read Candide and give him her opinion. The New York Fabians spoke of her as “a worthy female counterpart of G.B. Shaw.” When H.G. Wells came to the United States in 1904, she was the one person he asked to meet. Theodore Dreiser also asked to meet her.

From Library Journal

Until recently, feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) had been best known for her nonfiction writing, including Women and Economics (1898). Today, however, her fictional works--especially The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland --frequent high school and college reading lists. Like Herland, Benigna Machiavelli was first published serially in Gilman's own magazine, The Forerunner , appearing in 1914; it is now published in book form for the first time. A very funny fable, Benigna Machiavelli is the "autobiography" of 18-year-old Benigna MacAvelly, who is disgusted by her father's tyranny and abuse and sets out to free her mother, her older sister, and herself from his presence. At that time (the turn of the century), women and children had very little control, and yet through education, perseverance, and not a little manipulation, Benigna succeeds. Appropriate for academic and women's studies collections.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 153903156X
• ISBN 13: 9781539031567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108