Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was mostly self-educated, but became a leading intellectual in the women's movement. She began a career as a public lecturer in 1890, wrote many poems, articles, short stories, and novels, and between 1909 and 1916 wrote, edited, and published
The Forerunner, a monthly magazine. Her most famous book is
The Yellow Wallpaper, (1892) written after a bout of post-partum depression. She was didactic in all her writings - 'In my opinion it is a pretty poor thing
to write, to talk, without a purpose' - often with sardonic humour and always with compassion.
Benigna Machiavelli was serialised in
The Forerunner, Volume 5, 1914, and a version was published in pdf format by Bandanna Books in 1994. It is written as the autobiography from early childhood to early adult life of the plain child of an abusive father and an ineffectual mother - 'it wasn't so much father... that kept mother down... it was mostly her ideas of duty. She thought she had to submit and obey... she was bound by her own notions.'
The source for this edition was a text file in the Internet Archive at
https://archive.org/details/Benigna. The file lacks chapter three, which was replaced with plain text from
The Forerunner at
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000544186. Perhaps because of Ms
Gilman's prodigous output and lack of a proofreader there were several typos and inconsistencies. I have silently curled quotes, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, corrected typos, made names consistent, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com/US
English.
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