A short but useful essay on Gilman's life and work.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Bibliography
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/gilmancp-bibliography.html

Gives you a complete list of Gilman's published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminization of Education
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/WILLA/fall95/DeSimone.html

Written by Professor Deborah DeSimone, this is an interesting piece of scholarship on Gilman's ideas about women's education in America. This site looks at the sociohistorical and biographical contexts of Gilman's views of women's roles in the period—the central theme in all her work.

Behind the "Barred Windows": The Imprisonment of Women's Bodies and Minds in Nineteenth-Century America
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/WILLA/fall95/Murton.html

A fascinating piece of historical scholarship by Michelle Mock Murton, a doctoral student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Incorporating Gilman's own views on women, Murton looks at the medical, social, and literary treatments of women's bodies in the period. You can click onto almost any proper name in the essay for additional information. This site's excellent look at a cultural phenomenon that greatly impacted Gilman's work is especially useful if you are writing on Gilman's conceptions of women and mental health.

BIOGRAPHY
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Gilman's father deserted the family when she was young, leaving her mother to raise two children on her own.

Gilman is best known for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," the tale of a woman who goes mad after being prescribed a "rest cure" to relieve her of her desire to write. Gilman herself underwent such treatment in 1887 after suffering bouts of severe depression following the birth of her daughter in 1885. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman calls attention to the physical, psychological, and intellectual repression of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States.

Gilman became a popular writer and lecturer and was very active in political and reform movements. After divorcing her husband, she traveled widely, speaking on issues of women's rights, strongly advocating the need for women to achieve economic independence. In 1898, she published the book Women and Economics, today considered a classic feminist text.

Diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer in 1932, Gilman committed suicide in 1935. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published posthumously in 1935. Unpunished, a previously unpublished detective novel with a feminist message, which Gilman had completed in 1929, was published in 1997.