Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed.
In addition to her pioneering masterpiece, `The Yellow Wall-Paper' (1890), which draws on her own experience of depression and insanity, this edition features her Impress `story studies', works in the manner of writers such as James, Twain, and Kipling. These stories, together with other fiction from her neglected California period (1890-5), throw new light on Gilman as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In her Forerunner stories she repeatedly explores the situation of `the woman of fifty' and inspires reform by imagining workable solutions to a range of personal and social problems.