Cover of The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

Best known for the 1892 title story of this collection, a harrowing tale of a woman's descent into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote more than 200 other short stories. Seven of her finest are reprinted here.

Read more

Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naive servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women — and how they might be improved.

The yellow wallpaper

Three Thanksgivings

The cottagette

Turned

Making a change

If I were a man

Mr. Peebles' heart.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 70 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories Shares classics, short stories, fiction
  2. The Awakening and Selected Stories Shares classics, short stories, fiction
  3. The Story of an Hour Shares classics, short stories, literature
  4. Free onlineFree
    Twice-Told Tales Shares classics, short stories, fiction

“People who read The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Goblin Market
  2. BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
  3. A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
  4. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

“If you want more of the same (horror about feminism), start with these.”

  1. Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories by Women Celebrating Women
  2. Rape Fantasies
  3. You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Short Stories
  4. Difficult Women

“If it was the classics that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Young Goodman Brown
  2. Free onlineFree Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings
  3. To Build a Fire and Other Favorite Stories
  4. Great American Stories: Ten Unabridged Classics

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Art of the Short Story
  2. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
  3. Poppleton Forever
  4. Shattered