This sourcebook combines extracts from contemporary documents and critical reviews, providing an introduction, a publishing and critical history, a chronology of key events, a guide to further reading and original pictures.

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her landmark work, The Yellow Wall-Paper, generating spirited debates in literary and political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Today this story of a young wife and mother succumbing to madness is hailed both as a feminist classic and a key text in the American literary canon. This sourcebook combines extracts from contemporary documents and critical reviews with incisive commentary, providing: an introduction to the political, biographical and medical contexts in which Gilman was writing a publishing and critical history of the work with extracts from the earliest reviews through to recent criticism a chronology of key biographical and contextual events an annotated guide to further reading original illustrations and photographs of the author and figures related to the story. The volume also constitutes an important critical edition, reprinting the complete original text as published in the New England Magazine in 1892, with extensive commentary.

'A well-conceived, comprehensive, and useful volume that strikes a proper balance between historical contextualization, contemporary criticism, and annotation for the student reader. It will become the most ambitious and inclusive edition on The Yellow Wall-Paper to date.' - Denise D. Knight, State University of New York at Cortland ' With its attention to primary materials, [this] sourcebook is a valuable resource for college and university teaching' - Elke Kinkel, European Journal of English Studies