The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings

INTRODUCED BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL

'A great work of literature, the product of a questing, burning intellect'
MAGGIE O'FARRELL

'Even if the themes being explored might seem irrelevant . . . that this is
not the case' GUARDIAN

'I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending' PARIS REVIEW

'It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is
repellent . . . In the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just
so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to
skulk about . . . '

Based on the author's own experiences, The Yellow Wallpaper is the chilling
tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the 'rest cure' prescribed
after the birth of her child. Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a
room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper
winds its way into the recesses of her mind.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the
early twentieth century. In addition to her masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper,
this edition includes a selection of her best short fiction and extracts from
her autobiography.