Oh my. It's not often that a short story manages to be as deliciously creepy as this one did. Goodness, even most full-length horror stories struggle!

This is an absolute classic, an iconic tale of madness told in less than 100 pages.

I'm not one for reading blurbs, and for The Yellow Wallpaper? Honestly, I'm rather glad that this is the case. The blurb portrays a story of mystery, questioning whether our narrator is going mad or if she's been possessed by a sinister supernatural source. In my opinion, this is a story about

madness

and that the implied

supernatural

side doesn't come into the story at all. This is the ultimate story of

postpartum psychosis

, and seeing our narrator slowly descend into madness is both as real as it is disturbing. 

As with all stories of this age, we must always consider the book a product of its time. With most stories, this would include acknowledging how it has aged poorly. However, for The Yellow Wallpaper, let us consider how radical it must have been for a story with these themes to have been published in 1892! Involved in the first wave of feminism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has written a defining piece of literature highlighting female mental and physical health in a period when women didn't have the right to vote in the USA (where the author is from).

I highly recommend reading this short story; it's an immediate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ read. That ending! Creepy as can be. In so few pages, The Yellow Wallpaper sews a feminist tale of the dismissal of female mental (and physical) health in a society that cares not. For a story published in 1892, is it not terrifying to consider that little has changed?