The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings - (Modern Library Torchbearers) Abridged by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Collected fiction and essays by a pillar of the American feminist canon--with an introduction by Halle Butler, a National Book Award Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, editor, and journalist whose poems, articles, short stories, and novels had a single focus: equality for women. Although best known for "The Yellow Wall-Paper," her spine-chilling takedown of the "rest cure" prescribed for postpartum depression, Gilman spent her life advocating for a woman's right to an education, to creative self-expression and economic self-sufficiency, and an end to the consumerism that blinded women to the ways that society held them back.

This collection brings together Gilman's best-known work with her lesser-known satirical short stories to provide an overarching introduction to this relentless ideologue.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Review Quotes

"The most original and challenging mind which the [women's] movement produced."
--Carrie Chapman Catt

About the Author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a leading figure in the women's movement of the early twentieth century. Gilman's most famous work, "The Yellow Wall-Paper," was based on her own experiences with postpartum depression and launched her into the national spotlight. Her subsequent work was built on her belief that women are not only the equal of men but in many ways their superiors. Gilman died in 1935 as the result of a breast cancer diagnosis. Having been diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, she wrote that she "preferred chloroform to cancer."