The Yellow Wall-Paper

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Summary

'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.'

Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Gilman's work is available in Penguin Classics in The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland and Selected Writings.

About the author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Connecticut. She was a feminist and journalist and author of a number of fiction and non-fiction works. These include Women and Economics (1898), Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) and Herland (1915). She is best remembered for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ which describes the descent of a woman into madness following a ‘rest cure’. Unconventional in many ways, Gilman’s life included two marriages and separation from her nine-year-old daughter, whom she sent to live with her ex-husband and his new wife. She was a Suffragette, a public speaker on social issues and the editor of a number of literary magazines during her career. In 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer and, as an advocate of euthanasia, she took the decision to commit suicide. She did this on 17 August 1935 by taking an overdose of chloroform.

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