One joke that Perkins Gilman plays throughout is that the women simply don’t recognise their own achievements. There are all kinds of irony to this tale.

The story ends with Terry unceremoniously deported after one of his bids for mastery, in the bedroom, goes horribly wrong. When they first arrive, Terry refuses to believe that there aren’t some men around somewhere, pulling the strings – because how, after all, could you imagine women running anything? When eventually he has to accept that this is exactly what they are doing, he decides that what Herland needs is a bit of sex and a bit of male mastery. The story is all about the disruption of this world when three American males discover it: Vandyck Jennings, the nice-guy narrator Jeff Margrave, a man whose gallantry is almost the undoing of him in the face of all these ladies and the truly appalling Terry Nicholson.

The practical details are a bit unclear, but the women somehow just gave birth to baby girls, with no intervention from men at all. At the very beginning of its history, the founding mothers had somehow perfected the technique of parthenogenesis. And it all depends on one miraculous innovation. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful (even the cats have stopped killing the birds), brilliantly organised in everything from its sustainable agriculture and delicious food to its social services and education. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy about a nation of women – and women only – that has existed for two thousand years in some remote, still unexplored part of the globe. I n 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland.

Medusa and the blind woman book