Herland is the feminist response to Utopia. Set as a bit of adventure fiction featuring three strapping gentlemen who discover a strange island devoid of men, populated only by women. The land is a thriving stable government, free of waste and want, and repopulated through parthenogenesis.

The men try to integrate themselves into the civilization, each representing a point on the male-stereotype scale: Jeff is effeminate, Van is neutral, and Terry is masculine. In the end, after taking wives, Terry performs an atrocity that gets him banned from the island. The other two, and Van's wife Ellador, journey back to the man-run world.

The other stories presented here are a collection of Gilman's work, including "The Yellow Wallpaper," a haunting story about a woman confined to a room bedecked in ghastly wallpaper.

Gilman's feminist writing helps show a world in which women are just as good as men, and maybe even better in some aspects, such as running countries.

If you're a fan of feminist or utopian literature, you'll probably enjoy Herland and Selected Stories. ( )

Herland was part of my effort to read more science fiction classics. Gilman has a rather bracing tone in her fiction, as a rule, and that was quite evident in the short novel. I have read other treatments of an all-female society, and I have to say that I thought this one was a bit too optimistic. I do think that overall, a society run by women would probably be more humane than one run by men, but I have a hard time believing it would be quite as smooth as Gilman postulates. Still, centuries of selective breeding, with an emphasis on social skills and getting along, might do the trick. The stories were interesting, and I can see why she was thought to be so ahead of her time. It was refreshing to read some feminist stories that were positive and turned out well, and nice to see that Gilman doesn't assume that all men are evil. ( )