The Yellow Wallpaper

A young mother, recovering from what we would now call postnatal depression, is taken by her physician husband to a rented country house for a 'rest cure': no work, no visitors, no writing. Confined to an upstairs room with barred windows and torn yellow wallpaper, she keeps a secret journal, and as the weeks pass she becomes convinced that a woman is trapped behind the pattern of the paper, creeping and shaking it at night.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) had been prescribed the same treatment herself and later wrote that she published the story in 1892 to save other women from it. This short story is now a classic of feminist literature and of psychological horror. Gilman was also a well-known lecturer and the author of Women and Economics and the utopian novel Herland.