ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts reviews of Gilman’s early volumes In This Our World (1895), Women and Economics (1898), and Concerning Children (1901) with fan letters from England, Scotland, and around the world. While reviews praised Gilman for being scientific, intelligent, and forward in both her prose and poetry, personal letters testify to the subjective state involved in building a wide community of like-minded people. Correspondents’ expressions of affective communion gushed to overcompensate for the alienation of physical and cultural distances. Despite Gilman’s current reputation as a feminist who cultivated discourses of white race superiority, few of Gilman’s British reviewers or fans shared her Anglo-Saxonist or eugenic ideas.
