The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman is confined to a nursery by a physician husband who prescribes rest and forbids her to write. Over a few weeks she becomes absorbed by the pattern of the wallpaper. The story is told in short journal entries, and the gaps between them are where the horror sits.
Gilman drew on her own treatment and later explained that she wrote it to argue against a particular medical fashion. It takes twenty minutes to read and is one of the most anthologised American short stories for good reason.
Public-domain status
First published in 1892. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charlotte Perkins Gilman died in 1935, so this work has been free to republish there since 2006.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1952 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure