"In place of happy love, lonely pain. In place of motherhood, disease. Misery and shame, child. Medicine and surgery, and never any possibility of any child for me." First published in her magazine The Forerunner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Crux is an emotive tale on the nuances of female independence, social expectation and love in early 20th century America. Following an all-female group who move west to open a boarding house for men, The Crux focuses on the experience of Vivian and her desire for the undesirable. Deeply in love with Morton, a charismatic young man infected with both syphilis and gonorrhea, Vivian's expected journey through her 'marriage' years is abruptly turned upside down. Torn by her personal intuition, the advice provided by her female companions and the knowledge that Morton will never give her healthy children, Vivian is faced with a permanent choice to forfeit love for the benefit of future generations. Balancing female and male perspectives on illness, personal preservation and nationalism, The Crux tracks Vivian's path through heart break, emotional development and female camaraderie. As an allegory for Gilman's own branch of utopian feminism, The Crux is a story of sacrifice and partnership deliberation within the framework of 20th century disease hysteria, eugenic ideology and developing modernism. Often omitted from her writing canon, The Crux is an integral aspect to understanding not only Gilman's own writing but the history of feminism as a whole.

In 1892 a furious Charlotte Perkins Gilman put pen to paper and created the avant-garde feminist work The Yellow Wallpaper as a warning - in this haunting Gothic tale, a woman is confined to a room and forbidden to do anything interesting - and she loses her mind. In 1887, following a severe nervous breakdown, Gilman had been sent to a leading neurologist, she explains in 'Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper', also included in this volume. He was a 'wise man' who 'put me to bed and applied the rest cure... and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible"... and "never to touch pen, brush or pencil again" as long as I lived. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.' The Yellow Wallpaper is both a haunting illustration of the treatment of mental health and a chilling Gothic tale, and this new edition makes it ready to enchant another generation of readers.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a psychological short story about a Victorian woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When her husband deems she needs a "rest cure" after the birth of their child, they rent an abandoned colonial mansion with a "queer air" about it. The narrator's claustrophobic room has unpleasant, oppressive yellow wallpaper which incites her decent into madness.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will' Hailed as one of the most distinctive and compelling literary voices of her era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is praised today for her ground-breaking, feminist writing. Collected here, both The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland are extraordinary for scrutinising the patriarchal norms of turn-of-the-century America. In The Yellow Wallpaper a woman frantically paces the empty nursery at the top of a secluded mansion. Her husband John, a physician, is of no comfort and she can't bear to sit with the new baby as his crying makes her much too nervous. And then there's the putrid, yellow wallpaper which seems to shift and creep around the room before her very eyes... Herland, first published in 1915, follows a group of three men as they arrive in a female-only society. Peace and tranquillity thrive in this utopian land, forcing the explorers to question how their own corrupted, male-dominated world can survive.