This is a spine-tingling (not necessarily in a good way!) long short story with hauntingly gothic imagery that shifts and stirs beneath a prosaic surface.

The female protagonist is confined to her room as a 'rest cure' which might be associated with what we now recognise as post-natal depression, but the enforced 'rest' that is more akin to imprisonment releases something in her psyche that might be madness...

The yellow wallpaper of the title is both a kind of fairy-tale mirror and a window to another world that allows the narrator to see the female figures caught beneath it and living out their lives beneath its shadows, an incredibly haunting and indicting imagery for Victorian England.

This is only short (more a long short story than a novella) but it will stay with you for all that.

As an empowered female of bra-burning age, I get that I'm supposed to love this. After all, it focuses on the cavalier way women were treated (rest for mental illness instead of treatment - husband knows best - that sort of thing). It also provides insight into the protagonist's slow descent into madness. Written in journal format, we're privy to the private thoughts and, as the story and dementia progress, insane ramblings of a woman on the edge.

Surely this should be great... right? Hmm. Perhaps the hype overshadowed the story for me, but I didn't find it particularly haunting or innovative. Instead what I discovered was a well-written, if not memorable, tale of mental illness.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides a stunning and disturbing account of a woman's decline in madness. Margaret Atwood comments in the Blind Assassin that life is little more than a period of waiting interspersed with a few significant moments. For the nameless women in The Yellow Wallpaper, this is one of those moments. Over a three month period we see in acute and distressingly real detail how her inability to match her identity with the role of submissive wife that late Victorian society demanded leads to a steady, inexorable descent from sagacity to despair. Suffering from some unnamed illness - which modern readers might relate to post-natal depression, she is confined to a room for rest and sleep. Unable to find any outlet for emotion or intellect, she becomes obsessed with the room's wallpaper - its complex and endless pattern of pointless swirls. At first she just dislikes it, then hatred bordering on fear follows, to be usurped by a semi-dependent fascination and ultimately total identity: she becomes, not so much the wallpaper, but the embodiment of the creeping women who dwell, reluctantly, behind the pattern.

It is a picture of personal despair, of desperate attempts to retain sanity and ultimately of failure. On one level it's a chilling horror tale reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. On another it is a clinically precise picture of a mental aberration. But it is more than that. A powerful indictment of the institution of marriage, of the social mores and misguided kindliness of late Victorian middle-class America, and of the treatment of women, Gilman's story is as timeless as it is authentic.

As a short story alone this work is outstanding. Stylistically it is sparse and chilling, and as a psychological tale the horror of the detail is left to the reader. That is not to say this is a horror tale as one would normally expect, but a powerful evocation of how women were often mistreated and degraded by Victorian culture. It chronicles the tale of a free-thinking and self-willed woman who is forced to take the infamous rest-cure to prevent her from stretching beyond the limited boundaries set for middle-class housewives in the nineteenth century. Enforced rest with little entertainment or stimulus is really a form of incarceration with damaging psychological effects. These effects are recorded through the shapes and figures that manifest through the ghastly yellow wallpaper, which is intended to beautify the room but actually represents prison bars in a different form. Powerful, short and effective, this is an excellent short story - and worth reading alongside The Awakening as two standard texts for feminist analysis of this particular era.

Firstly, to the story itself. The narrative voice is a repressed woman of the late 19th century, locked in a room with horrid yellow wallpaper, expected by her husband to recover from a mysterious sickness. The more time she spends in this prison, desperate to write, the more disturbed she becomes, until she begins to see a woman crawling within the wallpaper. This is both a study of psychology and a look into the position of women of the period.
The style of the story is wonderfully haunting. The narrative is sparse and exclamatory. This publication has printed the lettering large so that the paragaphs are fairly spread out. The result is that the story appears like a long poem. It is easily read in half an hour or so.
I was very grateful for the very informative Afterword, which is actually longer than the story. It offers a background of the author and links her to other similar authors, as well as explaining the situation of the woman in the story. Without the Afterword, I think I would have been left chilled, but uninformed.