Story of the Week: Five Girls

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems

Interesting Links

“Drifting open eyed into insanity”: Early letters by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Sandra Knispel, University of Rochester)

“Rereading: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman review–no war, no men, no sex” (Constance Kampfner, The Sunday Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Unnatural Mother,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “My Girls,” Louisa May Alcott
• “Working at the Navy Yard,” Susan B. Anthony II

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Art Students [cropped], c. 1871, oil on canvas by German American artist Louis Lang. (Metropolitan Museum of Art; click here to see a fascinating online explanation of the painting and its rediscovery)

In 1897, while living in New York, Charlotte Perkins Stetson renewed her acquaintance with her cousin George Houghton Gilman, a Wall Street attorney who three years later would become her second husband. They had not seen each other for fifteen years and shortly after their reunion Charlotte shared with him issues of The Impress, a sixteen-page weekly she had edited in San Francisco from October 1894 to February 1895. George apparently read every issue, cover to cover, and she responded to his comments, “But most am I pleased with your remarks on the short stories. I take no small credit to myself on those efforts. It is the only ‘literary work’ I ever did; and I think some of it is good.”

When the future Charlotte Perkins Gilman had been living in northern California, she served as vice president and then president of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, as well as managing editor of the association’s paper, the Bulletin, which she renamed The Impress and expanded into a weekly. The publication’s headquarters was an apartment in San Francisco that Charlotte shared with her colleagues Paul Tyner, who had newspaper experience, and Helen Stuart Campbell, a modestly successful author of works on home economics and of children’s books, including the Ainslee series. Gilman recalled in her autobiography:

Our little weekly was a clean and handsome paper. Bruce Porter made a beautiful heading for it. Mr. Tyner did the political stuff, theatrical notes, and so on. I wrote articles, verses, editorials, ethical problems—a department, and reviews. We needed stories. I could not write a good story every week, much less buy one. So I instituted a series of "Studies in Style,” producing each week a short story, or a chapter from a long one, in avowed imitation of a well-known author. The readers were to guess the original, and the first correct guesser to receive a copy of one of that author's books. Sad to relate they never did, The Impress did not live long enough.

The stories in the series—there are seventeen of them—were published under the title “Who Wrote It?” and the answer to each riddle of authorship was printed in the following issue along with Gilman’s brief analysis of the distinctive features of the author’s literary style. Among the authors imitated were Rudyard Kipling, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Mark Twain. The series generated positive mentions in the press and seemed to be popular with readers. Gilman was especially delighted when nearly every contestant correctly guessed Mary E. Wilkins Freeman as the model for the highly praised second story; Gilman’s imitation proved to be the sincerest form of flattery for both authors. The stories vary in quality and a couple of them approach parody rather than pastiche, yet—as literary scholar Kenneth Huntress Baldwin has noted—in spite of Gilman’s protest that she “‘could not write a good story every week,’ she did, of course, just that, adding to the weekly task the demanding requirement of conforming each original story to the style of a different and influential author.” Complicating the challenge was the small space allotted—about two thousand words—to make each story or chapter complete, original, and recognizable.

One of the more successful stories is “Five Girls.” In the next issue of The Impress, Gilman described her approach:

Every girl in America ought to be able to recognize the author given in “Five Girls.” There might well have been a moment’s hesitation between one and another of our young girls’ favorites. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney might well have had a thought, and some few others; but none of them all has the breezy swing and warm cheerfulness of our old favorite Louisa M. Alcott.

In this little sketch, the points of composition kept in view are these: the dealing with earnest, gay, young people as characters; the whole-souled indifference to detail; the broad humanitarian trend, the insistence on happy family life, and on freedom and progress. In style, the little trick of three adjectives together, the general swift ease of handling, and the strongly personal trait of finishing a sentence in conversation with the act of the person speaking: as, “‘Indeed we will!’ said Kate, and rushed out of the room.” Or, “‘O girls, they’ve come! They’ve come!’ and pretty Susan fairly flew down stairs to meet them, while Rob pranced madly after.”

After twenty weeks, The Impress folded, both because it failed to reach the number of subscribers needed to pay the bills and because of Gilman’s damaged social reputation. She had willingly given up custody of her daughter to her ex-husband and she remained on companionable terms with his new wife—her closest childhood friend, Grace Ellery Channing—and even published a poem by her in The Impress. “That continued friendship was what the pure-minded San Franciscans could not endure,” she later wrote in her memoir. “Hatred, jealousy, preliminary misdemeanors, they would have accepted as quite natural. That we three should have remained in friendly correspondence, with mutual understanding, affection and respect, through these hard years, was to them incomprehensible.” The gossip about her personal affairs diminished the weekly’s opportunities; Gilman learned that Campbell had “made some inquiries as to the rather surprising lack of support, either in subscribers or advertisers, and was answered, ‘Nothing that Mrs. Stetson does can succeed here,’ and, ‘You risk your own reputation in joining her.’” Gilman resigned the position and soon moved to Chicago and, later, New York.

The seventeen stories published in The Impress had never been collected in full until, three years ago, they were reprinted in the Library of America edition of Gilman’s writings. The LOA edition also includes “The Unnatural Mother,” an eighteenth story that appeared in the final issue of The Impress in the spot usually reserved for the “Studies in Style” series. One of her more admired works, then and now, the story served as a wholly original and pointed answer to her critics.

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Note: The headless and armless Winged Victory of Samothrace is a classical Greek statue of the goddess Nike that was excavated on the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean Sea and transported to Paris in 1864. It has had a prominent place in the Louvre Museum since 1894 and countless replicas have been made since its rediscovery.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Five Girls

“There won’t be many more such good times as these for us,” said Olive Sargent, mournfully hugging her knees as she sat on the floor under the big Victory; “we’ve got to go out into the cold world presently and earn our livings.”

“I don’t mind earning the living a bit,” pretty Mollie Edgerton asserted; “I like to, and I shall never give it up; but I do hate to be separated the way we shall be. I wish we needn’t.” And Mollie dusted the crumbs of her luncheon from her spotless gingham apron.

The other girls always had charcoal on their aprons, or water colors, or oil, or dabs of clay; even sometimes all of these; but Mollie’s was always clean. To be sure, her work was mostly pencil drawing, the making of delicately beautiful designs for jewelry, for fans, for wood carving, for lace even—she was a born designer, and made the other girls green with envy.

Then Serena Woods opened her mouth and spoke. Serena was going to be an architect; indeed she was one already in a modest way, having planned the school-house in her native town, and also the dwelling of her married sister. To be sure, the sister did sometimes complain to intimate friends of certain minor deficiencies in the edifice, but what is that to a rising architect whose brain glows with enthusiasm and lives in a luminous cloud of architraves, pediments, and facades. She spoke slowly, looking down from her perch on a high stool. “Girls, let’s not separate. “Let’s go and live together in a house of our own. I’ll build it.”

“O do!” said Julia Morse, “I’ll decorate it! We shall each have a room in our favorite color, with most appropriate designs, and the rooms down stairs shall be a real sermon and poem in one!” And Julia gushed on with fervid descriptions of her proposed scheme of mural decoration, while the others joined in rapturous applause.

Then Maud Annersley joined in. Maud was a tall, pale, slender girl, with dark, thoughtful, blue eyes and a quiet voice. She was a painter, and had had a picture in the last exhibition which had won approval from the best critics. “Do you know,” she said earnestly, “that we really might do this thing? We are all good friends and used to rooming together for these two years. We know all we mean to each other and when to stop—when to let each other alone. We’ve all got to earn our living, as Olive says, and it would be cheaper to earn it together than it would apart.” And Maud rinsed her biggest brush in the turpentine cup with severe decision.

Olive rose to her feet tempestuously.

“I do believe we could!” she said, her blue eyes lighting with sudden fervor. “What is to hinder our joining forces and working on together, having the sweetest, grandest, most useful life in the world! We could club our funds, go to some nice place where land is cheap, and Serena could really plan for us one of those splendid compound houses that are so beautiful and convenient. We could arrange it with studios, all as they should be, and other artists could rent them of us to help on. You know I shall have some money as soon as I’m twenty-one; and I’d rather invest it so than any way I know.” Olive stopped for breath, flushed and triumphant; and the others looked at each other with new earnestness.

“We’re talking of an awfully serious thing,” said Maud. “It would mean living, you know, really living right along;” and she scraped her palette softly as she talked, making a beautiful mixed tint of the spotty little dabs of burnt sienna, cadmium and terre vert. “There is no reason we should not do it though. But it ought to mean for life, and we’re not all going to be single, I hope.”

Beautiful Maud, with her pale, sweet, oval face and wealth of soft, glistening, chestnut hair, had seen her lover buried, and turned to her chosen art as a life-long companion. But, she could speak all the more earnestly to her heart free friends; though there was a tell-tale blush on pretty Mollie’s cheek, and Julia looked a little conscious as she spoke.

“Well anyway,” said the last named damsel, with rather a defiant tone; “if we do marry we don’t mean to give up our work I hope. I mean to marry some time, perhaps—but I don’t mean to cook! I mean to decorate always, and make lots of money and hire a housekeeper.”

“I don’t see” said Mollie dimpling softly, “why that should be an obstacle. Couldn’t we have a house so big and beautiful and live so happily and get to be so famous that—that—if any one wanted to marry us they could come there too?”

“What sort of compound fractions do you think we are?” demanded Serena. “Any one marry us indeed! It would take five to marry us, Mollie!”

“Now stop joking, girls,” said Olive. “We are all grown and trained. We all want to always work—indeed, some of us have got to. Now, honestly, why shouldn’t we build a sort of apartment home you know, a beautiful ‘model tenement’ affair, artistic and hygienic and esthetic and everything else; with central kitchens and all those things; and studios and rooms for ourselves, and a hall to exhibit in and so on. Then we could have suites of apartments for families and let them; and bye and bye, if we are families, we can occupy those ourselves and let the others!”

And Olive hugged the headless Victory in her enthusiasm while the girls applauded rapturously.

Then what a happy year they had before their course at the Institute was finished! Such innumerable plans and elevations; such glowing schemes of color, such torrents of design for carving and painting and modelling, such wild visions of decoration, where races and epochs and styles waltzed madly together in interminable procession.

The class work went on, of course, and Maud’s great picture won the first prize at the exhibition, though no one guessed that the lovely walls in the background were from one of Serena’s least practicable elevations, and that the group of girls in front were the future owners thereof. There was a troubadour in it also, but he was purely imaginary; though Maud did tell Mollie that he was the fortunate youth that was going to marry them.

It was but a year or two before the lovely plan came true, for after all there was nothing impossible in it. Between them all there was money enough to buy the lot and build the house, and the “families” consented to hire apartments therein to such an extent as to furnish all the funds for running expenses.

Julia Morse’s redoubtable Aunt Susan came down from her New Hampshire home to keep house in the new mansion, and declared that she never had had half a chance to show what was in her before.

Olive’s widowed mother made the dearest of chaperones for the girls, and their long parlor rang with music and merriment on the pleasant winter evenings.

The studios were easy to let also, and the velveteen coat and loose blouse became as frequent in the long halls as the paint-daubed gingham apron. Also the troubadour materialized in the shape of a most angelic-voiced singing master, who occupied a room on the top floor; and who, though he did not marry them all, as was aforetime suggested, did marry Olive in due season and stayed in the same pleasant quarters thereafter. Only a “family” was evicted, so to speak, for their convenience, and Olive’s room was let to an aspiring little sister of the troubadour.

Pretty Mollie followed suit in a few months more—it took some time to convince her devoted but conservative lover that they could just as well have a suite in this beautiful great home cluster as in a flat near the park. Every girl of them married, as years passed on; even Maud, who forgot her early sorrow in a newer, deeper joy.

But live together they did, and work together always, with various breaks and lapses, as the sweet home cares sometimes interfered with working hours, and the charming little kindergarten in the south wing grew fuller and fuller.

“There’s nothing like planning things for life,” said Olive one still June evening in after years, as the same five girls sat together on the rose shadowed porch; older, but no less earnest in their work and their love for each other.

“That’s so,” said Serena heartily—“especially when you do the things you plan.”

First published in The Impress (December 1, 1894).

Sunday, December 7, 2025

Five Girls