At the turn of the century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a celebrity—acclaimed as a leader in the feminist movement and castigated for her divorce, her relinquishment of custody of her daughter, and her unconventional second marriage. She was also widely read, with stories in popular magazines and with dozens of books in print. But her most famous short story, the intensely personal "The Yellow Wallpaper," read as a horror story when first published in 1891 and lapsed into obscurity before being rediscovered and reinterpreted by feminist scholars in the 1970s, and her landmark feminist utopian novel, Herland, remained unavailable for more than sixty years.
