Frederick Beecher Perkins, a noted professional librarian, left his wife and family when his daughter Charlotte was still a small child, and while she did not entirely lose contact with him, he became ‘a stranger, distant and little known’ (Gilman 1935, p. 5). However, she was extremely proud of her father’s family, which included the social activist and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, the educational reformer Catharine Beecher, and the abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gilman noted that ‘by heredity I owe [my father] much; the Beecher urge to social service, the Beecher wit and gift of words and such small sense of art as I have’ (p. 6).
While Gilman’s psychological suffering at the hands of quack doctor Silas Weir Mitchell and his so-called ‘rest cure’ may be seen as the DNA of The Yellow Wallpaper, within the story she radically reframed and transformed her experience of postpartum psychosis and inept medical treatment. Significantly, the narrative, which unfolds over a three-month period, was written five years after Gilman (then Charlotte Perkins Stetson) gave birth to her daughter Katharine in 1885. By the time it was published, she and her husband were divorced. (She remarried in 1900, when she became Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)
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