A woman on a summer 'rest cure' is shut by her physician husband into a former nursery at the top of a rented house, forbidden to work or write, and left alone with the sickly paper on the walls. Her secret diary tracks, entry by entry, how the pattern begins to move — how a figure creeps behind it, how the smell gets into her hair — until the wallpaper is the only thing she is allowed to think about, and she resolves to free whatever is trapped inside. Gilman wrote it out of her own near-collapse under exactly that treatment, and six thousand words about a locked room became the founding text of American feminist horror.