The Yellow Wallpaper

Published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the most unsettling short stories ever written. Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew on her own terrifying experience of the "rest cure" — a Victorian treatment for nervous disorders that prescribed complete mental inactivity — to craft this first-person account of a woman slowly losing her mind in a rented summer house. Confined to a room with hideous yellow wallpaper, she begins to see a woman trapped behind the pattern, creeping along the walls. Haunting, claustrophobic and brilliantly written, it reads as both a gothic horror story and a devastating critique of how women were treated by medicine and marriage in the 19th century.

Narrated in a distinct natural voice — different from every other audiobook on this site, because every great story deserves its own voice. Stream free, no account required.