SOURCE: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 51-53. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1992.

In the following essay, originally published in 1913 in The Forerunner, a magazine founded and edited by Gilman, the author offers an explanation of her original intention in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and—begging my pardon—had I been there?

Now the...