In this selection from the Spencer Library of Literary Classics, we present a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although known during her own lifetime more for writings of social commentary, history and utopian fiction, Gilman, in 1892 published a work that survives today as her short story masterpiece. Labelled an unnerving ghost story by some, a tale of true psychological horror by others, Gilman’s story is something much more disturbing; it is autobiographical.

Just as Charlotte Perkins Gilman had done, the narrator of this story, against all of the warnings from the men she trusted most, sits at her writing desk, lifts her pen and describes in vivid detail the strange effects of the Yellow Wallpaper.