The Yellow Wallpaper ★★★★☆
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
The dismissal, infantilisation and isolation faced by the protagonist is still infuriatingly resonant. Her husband, a physician, knows what’s best for her and refuses to let any objection or evidence to the contrary create a chink in his paternalism as his wife spirals further and further. And as a horror piece, the descriptions of the wallpaper itself are wonderfully vivid and horrid, and the changing relationship of the protagonist to it as, with her life emptied of anything else, it worms its way into her mind is great.