The Yellow Wallpaper

1892
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
B+

Probably Gilman's most famous work, this holds up really well, whether as a horror story of growing insanity or as an indictment of a repressive marriage.  Not that the two are entirely separable, since the way that the narrator's doctor/husband treats her, with condescension and flat-out bad advice (avoid interesting people and activities), is horrible, perhaps all the more horrible because it's meant kindly.  Unless he's Gaslighting her?  It's hard to tell, of course, how much is real.  Does he actually faint in the end, as she goes creeping around the room, her identity merged with the imprisoned woman behind the wallpaper?  However you take it, Gilman has finally mastered endings.  And this is a much more vivid story than the previous two, so by the end, you also will hate the wallpaper.  I know I said I dislike being inside Anna Karenina's head as she goes insane, but I think the insanity is more plausible here, and the heroine more sympathetic.  Gilman knew firsthand the horrors of being forbidden to write, and that would probably be one of my own personal hells.