Short Stories About Madness: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about madness, from The Yellow Wallpaper and The Tell-Tale Heart to Ward No. 6, The Horla and Gogol's Diary of a Madman, summarised and compared.
Madness is the short story's natural first person. A novel cannot sustain a mind coming apart for four hundred pages, but a story can follow it for twenty and stop at the moment the reader can no longer tell who is right.
The collection begins with the diaries, where the reader watches the handwriting change, moves through the doctors and the wards, and ends with a clergyman and a small black monkey. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A woman recovering from what her physician husband calls a nervous condition keeps a secret journal in a room with barred windows and torn yellow paper. She starts to see a pattern in the paper, and then a woman behind it.
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. A narrator who begins by insisting on his sanity describes how he loved an old man and killed him for his eye, taking a whole hour each night to open the door. With the police in the room, he hears a sound.
Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol. A minor clerk in love with his director's daughter begins intercepting letters between two dogs, and learns from them what the household thinks of him. Then the newspapers report that Spain has no king.
A Madman's Diary by Lu Xun. A man convinced that his neighbours, his doctor and his elder brother are cannibals reads the histories and finds the words eat people between the lines. His last entry is a plea for the children.
Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov. Dr Ragin, who runs a filthy provincial hospital without caring, discovers that the one intelligent man in town is a patient in the locked ward, and starts visiting for conversation. The town notices.
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. A landowner's diary records a fever, a sense of being watched, and a carafe of water that empties itself in the night. He builds a trap out of his own house.
The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov. Kovrin, an exhausted scholar, is visited in the garden by a monk in black who glides across the fields and tells him he is one of God's chosen. Cured, he becomes an ordinary man and hates everyone who helped.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Roderick Usher, all nerves, cannot bear light or sound, and his house has a crack running down it that the narrator notices on arrival. His sister is buried in the vault, and a week later there are sounds.
Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe. Egaeus, who can stare at a margin for hours, is betrothed to his cousin Berenice as her illness wastes her, and becomes fixed on one feature of her face. After the funeral a servant points at a box on the table.
Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu. A kindly clergyman, Mr Jennings, is followed everywhere by a small black monkey with red eyes that only he can see, and consults a physician who blames his habits. The monkey starts to speak.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that madness in fiction is a problem of testimony, and the writers split on where to stand. Poe, Gogol and Maupassant stay inside the head and let the reader decide when to stop believing; Chekhov stands outside, in the ward and the garden, and shows the sane world doing the damage. Gilman and Lu Xun are the political cases, where the reader is asked whether the madness might be a diagnosis of the house or the country.
Gogol's clerk and Lu Xun's diarist are eighty years apart and read like one voice; Lu Xun took the title deliberately.
Writory's judges score Voice as one of their five marks, and a first-person narrator whose reliability drains away line by line, as Poe's and Gogol's do, is where a high Voice mark usually comes from.
If you want to write about madness
What writers can take from this
- Read The Yellow Wallpaper and The Horla together; they are the two great diaries of confinement.
- Gogol and Lu Xun are the comic and political pair, and both are short.
- Ward No. 6 is the longest here and the calmest; read it as a hospital story before you read it as anything else.
- Poe's three stories are best read in the order given, ending on the box.
- Green Tea is the one people forget; its physician narrator is the ancestor of every doctor in horror fiction.
Try it yourself
Write a story as a series of dated entries in which the narrator describes an ordinary object in their room, and let the descriptions change while the object does not.
Questions
What is the best short story about madness?
The Yellow Wallpaper is the most studied, and Ward No. 6 the most admired. Diary of a Madman is the funniest and the saddest.
Which short stories about madness are good for students?
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Yellow Wallpaper and The Black Monk are much taught. A Madman's Diary is the standard for classes on Chinese literature.
Which classic story about madness is the shortest?
The Tell-Tale Heart, at about two thousand words. Berenice is roughly the same.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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