"The Yellow Wallpaper"

In January 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her semi-autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in the New England Magazine. The tale’s heroine is a depressed new mother who goes mad while enduring a modified Rest Cure. Gilman herself underwent the Rest Cure in 1887 at the hands of Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who is briefly mentioned in the story. Image: Photograph of Silas Weir Mitchell, 1881. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.