The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America’s leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. In addition to her pioneering masterpiece, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1890), which draws on her own experience of depression and insanity, this edition features her Impress ‘story studies’, works in the manner of writers such as James, Twain, and Kipling. These stories, together with other fiction from her neglected California period (1890-5), throw new light on Gilman as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In her Forerunner stories she repeatedly explores the situation of the ‘woman of fifty’ and inspires reform by imagining workable solutions to a range of personal and social problems. The introduction to this edition places Gilman in the cultural and historical context of the American divided self, her Beecher heritage, and her contribution to the female Gothic.