Her childhood foreshadowed the emotional upheaval she experienced in her adult life. Her father left their family, forcing Charlotte's mother (Mary Fitch Perkins) and siblings into poverty and instability. Gilman's ambivalent attitude towards marriage and children perhaps comes from her father's abandonment and mother's "cold and detached" attitude (Grade Saver).
One of her most famous works, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is in many ways, a dramatized autobiography. Early on in her marriage to Charles Walter Stetson, she began to suffer from depression after realizing that domestic life was not for her. After the birth of their first and only child, Katherine Beecher, she sunk into despair for months, eventually consulting Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who prescribed his "famous Victorian 'rest cure' of bed rest and restricted intellectual activity" (2015 Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame). The months of inactivity only sank her deeper into despair and she eventually broke free of her doctor's care, moving to California and divorcing Charles Stetson.
Like Edgar Allan Poe, she was not respected for her literary work until well after her death in 1935. After a diagnosis of inoperable breast cancer, Gilman committed suicide by overdosing on chloroform. She left a note that said: "When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer" (Spartacus Educational).
1.) http://spartacus-educational.com/USAperkinsC.htm
2.) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/yellowwallpaper/context.html
3.) http://connecticuthistory.org/charlotte-perkins-gilman-born-in-hartford/
