Victorian Visual Culture

The image below is the cover of the first full-length edition of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman wrote Herland in 1915 and published it serially in her literary magazine The Forerunner. The novel was first published in book form in 1979 when the London-based feminist publisher The Women’s Press Ltd. picked it to share with a wider contemporary audience. The original 1979 edition features a striking bookcover, with the cover collage by Joan Hall and cover design by Louise Fili.

Herland Synopsis:

Herland is a feminist utopian novel that imagines a remote, self-sustaining society composed entirely of women. Reproducing through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction), the women of Herland have, over generations, built a peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian culture free from warfare and domination.

The story is narrated by sociology student Vandyck “Van” Jennings, who, along with two male companions, stumbles upon this hidden civilization. Their encounter with the women of Herland forces each of them (and by extension the reader) to reconsider deeply rooted assumptions about gender roles, power structures, reproduction, and social organization. Gilman’s imagined world becomes both a critique of patriarchal norms and a bold blueprint for alternative social possibilities.

Artists behind the collage, Joan Hill & Louise Fili:

Both Joan Hall and Louise Fili bring a distinctly feminist sensibility to this cover, though through different artistic languages. Hall’s collage practice often involves recombining historical or found images. By transforming anonymous photographs of women into an interconnected flowering structure, she reclaims their representation and turns them into symbols of agency, lineage, and growth, reshaping inherited imagery to tell women’s stories on women’s terms. Fili’s design and typographic work, celebrated for its elegance and its embrace of ornament, elevates visual forms traditionally coded as “feminine” into the realm of serious, high-impact design. Together, Hall and Fili craft a visual statement aligned with Gilman’s themes, one meant to project the power of women’s interconnectedness and the radical possibilities that emerge when female creativity, agency, and community take center stage.

Unpacking the Cover:

The 1979 cover of Herland resembles a Victorian photocollage and can be seen as a continuation of their proto-feminist narrative. The photographs of women’s faces—anonymous to us, their origins and identities unknown—emerge from a green stalk like blossoms. Of the four growing heads, three women look directly out at the viewer, their gazes steady and almost confrontational; the fourth looks downward, her face turned away.

The three direct gazes confront the viewer with an assertiveness that challenges the traditionally passive way women have been imaged in art and photography. Their upward growth suggests empowerment, emergence, and emerging visibility. The fourth head looks down, perhaps representing the women who have not yet gained the confidence to look forward. The inclusion of this woman suggests that all women, regardless of their confidence or visibility, are linked to each other and growing together.

At the base lies another woman, this time her full body, as she curls inwards on herself. It appears as if the stalk and therefore the other women are growing out of her. She can be read as the generational foundation; the unseen emotional, physical, and cultural labor from which others grow. Her collapsed posture symbolizes the toll the weight of such wisdom can take. The fact that the other figures appear to grow from her body turns her into both a literal and metaphorical source, underscoring themes of matrilineal continuity and the labor that sustains women’s communities. It mirrors Herland’s vision of disrupting traditional patriarchal structures and imagining a society built on cooperation, equality, and shared purpose.

The collage medium itself ties the cover to a longstanding feminist artistic tradition. Photocollage has often allowed women artists to reclaim and reassemble historical imagery, reshaping it into narratives of empowerment and solidarity. In this way, the cover effectively participates in the political and feminist intentions of the text.

In sum, the 1979 Herland cover by Joan Hall and Louise Fili does more than illustrate Gilman’s text—it enacts its feminist vision through visual form. By using a collage of women’s images, Hall and Fili both honor and transform the anonymous, often passive representations of women found in historical photography, echoing the Victorian photocollage tradition in which found images were rearranged to produce new narratives. Just as Victorian women artists experimented with layering, juxtaposition, and recontextualization to assert agency and authorship, this cover recombines female imagery into a living, growing structure that embodies the intergenerational strength, cooperation, and emergence central to Herland. In doing so, the design bridges past and present, showing how feminist visual practices—from early photographic experiments to late-20th-century book art—can reclaim, reshape, and celebrate women’s lives and labor, making the cover itself a continuation of Gilman’s utopian imagination.

Sources

About Louise Fili Ltd — Louise Fili Ltd. (n.d.). Louise Fili Ltd. https://www.louisefili.com/about

Gilman, C. P. (1979). Herland. The Women’s Press Ltd.

Herland. (n.d.). American Literature. https://americanliterature.com/author/charlotte-perkins-gilman/book/herland/summary

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (n.d.). Grab the Lapels. https://grabthelapels.com/2021/11/09/herland/ Image of the cover originated from this source.

Mixed Media & Handmade Paper Sculptor | Joan Hall Studios. (2025, February 25). Joan Hall Studios. https://www.joanhallstudio.com/

Siegel, Elizabeth, et al. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.