Read “The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I believe Charlotte Perkins Gilman said herself that she never thought about being a novelist, yet she wrote amazing stories. 
In a sense she’s maybe referring to her ability to construct a complete, thorough structure for her novel, as her short fictions are the ones that continue to catch our eyes more than a century later. It’s not that her novel isn’t amazing, it is just that her short stories are much more distilled, with simple but powerful idea that each contains a hard-to-avoid narrative.
Her essays, which are equally important and deserve to be collected and preserved, however, are less distinguish as her fictional work from my point of view; theory evolves with new research and social condition and can be outdated. With so much development and fundamental shift, feminism today is far broader and more complex than the one her generation struggle to develop. Although many are still not achieved, we can see that feminist today has a much more diverse goals and her essays are more of a philosophical foundation than practical tools any more.
I enjoy the short fictions significantly more than her other works.