The Yellow Wallpaper

Confined to an upstairs room for a ‘rest cure’ after childbirth, a young woman forbidden to work or write becomes obsessed with the sickly yellow wallpaper around her, convinced a figure is trapped and creeping behind its pattern. Told through her secret journal, the story charts her chilling descent as enforced idleness and her husband’s condescension drive her toward madness. A devastating critique of the way nineteenth-century medicine and marriage silenced women, it is both a masterful psychological horror story and a landmark of feminist literature. Brief, unforgettable, and profoundly disturbing, it has lost none of its power.