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INTRODUCED BY MAGGIE O’FARRELL

‘A great work of literature, the product of a questing, burning intellect’ MAGGIE O’FARRELL

‘Even if the themes being explored might seem irrelevant . . . that this is not the case’ GUARDIAN

‘I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending’ PARIS REVIEW

‘It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . . ‘

Based on the author’s own experiences, The Yellow Wallpaper is the chilling tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the ‘rest cure’ prescribed after the birth of her child. Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America’s leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. In addition to her masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper, this edition includes a selection of her best short fiction and extracts from her autobiography.