‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.
Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the unnamed woman from working or writing and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a ‘temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency’, a common diagnosis in women at the time.