With Her in Ourland
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| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Utopian fiction |
| Publisher | Charlton Co. (serial) Greenwood Press (book) |
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Publication date
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1916 (serial) 1997 (book) |
| Pages | 200 pp. (book) |
| ISBN | |
With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland is a feminist novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and originally published in 1916 in Gilman's self-authored and edited periodical The Forerunner. As its subtitle indicates, the book is the sequel to Perkins Gilman's Herland, published in the previous year, 1915.
The twelve chapters of With Her in Ourland were published serially in the twelve monthly issues of The Forerunner in 1916; the novel concluded in the final issue of Gilman's periodical, which ceased publication in December 1916.
Both Herland and Ourland lapsed into obscurity during the middle decades of the twentieth century; but both books have benefitted from increased critical and scholarly attention after republication — Herland in 1979 and Ourland in 1997.
Both Herland and Ourland belong to the genre of utopian and dystopian fiction, and participated in the major wave of utopian literature that characterized the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Ourland is the third volume in a trilogy of major utopian works by Gilman, which began with her Moving the Mountain in 1911.)
The utopian aspect is stronger in Herland, while its sequel draws a contrast between Gilman's idealized vision of a feminist society and the darker realities of real, outside, male-dominated world. Together, the two works comprise a "composite utopia."
The 1997 reprint of With Her in Ourland is unusual in its emphasis on the novel's sociological aspects. Editor Mary Jo Deegan, a professor of sociology, notes in her Introduction that while most contemporary attention to Gilman's work comes from literary criticism and feminist studies, Gilman was a sociologist, recognized as such by her contemporaries, and that Ourland benefits from a reading as a work of sociology.
With Her in Ourland begins where its predecessor Herland ends: Vandyck Jennings, his newlywed Herlandian wife Ellador, and the exiled Terry Nicholson proceed by airplane and motor launch away from Herland and back to the outside world. (Ourland is narrated by the Jennings character.) At an unnamed Eastern seaport, the three board a ship for the United States. Their craft is battered by a storm, however; the three travelers take alternative passage on a Swedish ship that is heading to Europe. This detour brings Van and Ellador into contact with World War I, then raging; and Ellador is devastated by the carnage and horrors of the conflict.
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