The first new biography, a must for “Wallpaper” geeks, is the elegantly written Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of the Yellow Wall-Paper, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, which, focuses on Gilman’s early life before she published that story. Feminists have critiqued Mitchell as personally defining the “20h-century doctor-patient relationship.” In the story, Gilman takes on and names her own famous real-life doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, who treated her postpartum depression. Since its rediscovery in the 1970s, it has been included in just about every short-story anthology published, iconic for its critique of women infantilized by the medical system. Gilman is most famous for her goth-feminist 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” about a woman’s prescribed “rest cure” after childbirth and subsequent descent into madness. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935, is also re-emerging in the spotlight with a bevy of recent books about her, including two absorbing new biographies. Today, Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, the subject of a big Hollywood film, is not the only 19th-century woman writer newly capturing the public imagination with her portrayal of a “madwoman” in an attic.
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