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In this classic late-nineteenth-century story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a new mother suffering from what we might today call 'post-partum depression', is diagnosed with a nervous disorder.

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness.

This novelette originally appeared in New England Magazine, January 1892, before being published as a standalone volume in 1899. The story has been reprinted many times. Among others, it can be found in the anthologies:

• American Mystery Stories (1927), edited by Carolyn Wells
• The Haunted Omnibus (1937), edited by Alexander Laing
• More Macabre (1961), edited by Donald A. Wollheim
• House Shudders (1987), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh
• The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror (1987), edited by David G. Hartwell
• American Gothic Tales (1996), edited by Joyce Carol Oates
• The American Fantasy Tradition (2002), edited by Brian M. Thomsen
• H. P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural: Classic Tales of the Macabre (2007), edited by Stephen Jones
• American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (2009), edited by Peter Straub

The story is included in the collections Herland: and Selected Stories (1992) and The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings (2009).

A powerful collection of early feminist stories from the activist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Gilman created a world that could be viewed from the feminist gaze. She focused on how women were not just stay-at-home mothers they were expected to be but also people who had dreams, who were able to travel and work just as men did, and whose goals included a society where women were just as important as men. In the early 1900s this was striking and revolutionary.

The stories in this collection are:

• A Coincidence
• According To Solomon
• An Offender
• A Middle-Sized Artist
• Martha's Mother
• Her Housekeeper
• When I Was A Witch
• Making a Living
• A Coincidence, The Cottagette
• The Boys and the Butter
• My Astonishing Dodo
• A Word In Season

The focus of this work is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman developed as a writer and how she imagined a full-blown utopia for women. It offers a fresh reading of Gilman's fiction and fills a void in Gilman scholarship, in feminist utopian scholarship and in American literary studies.

A prominent turn-of-the-century social critic and lecturer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps best known for her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," a chilling study of a woman's descent into insanity, and Women and Economics, a classic of feminist theory that analyzes the destructive effects of women's economic reliance on men.

In Herland, a vision of a feminist utopia, Gilman employs humor to engaging effect in a story about three male explorers who stumble upon an all-female society isolated somewhere in South America. Noting the advanced state of the civilization they've encountered, the visitors set out to find some males, assuming that since the country is so civilized, "there must be men." A delightful fantasy, the story enables Gilman to articulate her then-unconventional views of male-female roles and capabilities, motherhood, individuality, privacy, the sense of community, sexuality, and many other topics.

Decades ahead of her time in evolving a humanistic, feminist perspective, Gilman has been rediscovered and warmly embraced by contemporary feminists. An articulate voice for both women and men oppressed by the social order of the day, she adeptly made her points with a wittiness often missing from polemical writings.