The Yellow Wallpaper
About this audiobook
A groundbreaking feminist masterpiece and one of the most exquisite horror stories in American literature.
Diagnosed by her physician husband with a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” after the birth of her child, a woman is urged to rest for the summer in an old colonial mansion. Forbidden from doing work of any kind, she spends her days in the house’s former nursery, with its barred windows, scratched floor, and peeling yellow wallpaper.
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the “horrid” wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.
With masterly use of unreliable storytelling and a scathing indictment of patriarchal medical practices, The Yellow Wallpaper is a true American classic.
About the author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) gained much of her fame with lectures on women’s issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform. She often referred to these themes in her fiction. She is best remembered for her 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” based on her own bout with severe postpartum depression and misguided medical treatment.
Beata Poźniak, known for playing Marina Oswald in Oscar nominated JFK, has narrated bestsellers The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great and Illuminae, which received an Audie Award. The Tsar of Love and Techno was selected in the Top 5 Best Audiobooks of the Year by the Washington Post. She received an Earphones Award for narrating Nobel Prize–winning Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and another Earphones Award for The Light in Hidden Places, which followed a Voice Arts Award Nomination for Libretto for the Desert: Poetry Dedicated for the Victims of Genocide and War.
