•Why it earns a slot
Written from Gilman's own experience of the 'rest cure' prescribed by neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, the story is a precise first-person account of how medical paternalism and enforced idleness can accelerate the very breakdown they claim to treat.
A woman diagnosed with a 'nervous condition' is confined to a barred nursery room by her physician husband and forbidden to write or work. Over the course of a summer she becomes obsessed with the room's hideous yellow wallpaper, gradually perceiving a woman trapped behind its pattern. By the final day she has torn off most of the paper, fully identified with the imprisoned figure, and is found creeping around the room on all fours while her husband faints at the sight.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.