Coming after two novellas featuring Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four), “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a short detective story, first appeared in the Strand magazine in July 1891. It recounts the case of the king… Read More ›
Month: October 2022
Analysis of George Eliot’s The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton
Encouraged by George Henry Lewes, Mary Ann (Marian) Evans purposed to write publishable fiction and began with a title that came to her in the middle of one night, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.” She conceived a… Read More ›
Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Round the Sofa
Round the Sofa, a two-volume collection of stories, short novels, and essays by Elizabeth Gaskell, was made up of earlier works published previously in magazines, notably Charles Dickens’s Household Words and, in America, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The disparate… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
In this much-anthologized story, Thomas Hardy combines realism and imagination to create a romance that illustrates the danger of allowing sexual desire to influence one’s marriage choice. Set in the village of Silverthorn in Hardy’s Lower Wessex, “The Romantic Adventures… Read More ›
Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner
David Ellis, in his account of D. H. Lawrence’s late years, explains that the author was paid 15 pounds for allowing the publication of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” in Cynthia Asquith’s 1926 anthology, The Ghost Book. This, states Ellis, was a… Read More ›
Analysis of E. M. Forster’s The Road from Colonus
“The Road from Colonus” was written by E. M. Forster in 1903, shortly after he had visited Olympia in Greece. He had gone there as part of a cruise group made up largely of classical scholars against the enthusiasm and… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry James’s The Real Thing
“The Real Thing” was published in 1892 in Black and White and is considered among Henry James’s finest short stories. The tale explores the complicated interplay of life and art, of object and imagination. The unnamed narrator is an illustrator… Read More ›
Analysis of Ted Hughes’s The Rain Horse
Only two characters appear in Ted Hughes’s bestknown short story: an unnamed man and a black horse. The man, returning to a rural landscape after a 12-year absence, is attacked inexplicably by the horse but escapes muddy and unharmed. Compared… Read More ›
Analysis of Angela Carter’s Puss-in-Boots
This story is the most ebullient of the reimagined fairy tales in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. The volume’s title suggests the more characteristic tone of these tales of sex, violence, and the struggles for power within male-female… Read More ›
Analysis of Fay Weldon’s Pumpkin Pie
Fay Weldon’s story “Pumpkin Pie,” published in the 1991 collection Moon over Minneapolis: Or Why She Couldn’t Stay, uses a shifting style of narration and integrated symbolism to comment on class and gender issues. The story follows Antoinette, a maid… Read More ›
Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Psychopolis
The final story in Ian McEwan’s collection In between the Sheets (1978), “Psychopolis” was originally published in American Review and anthologized in the influential The Penguin Book of Modern Short Stories (1987), edited by Malcolm Bradbury, McEwan’s former tutor at… Read More ›
Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
The publication by Duckworth of D. H. Lawrence’s first volume of short stories on November 26, 1914, collected writing from as early as 1907. Except for the unpublished Daughters of the Vicar, the book was compiled from work that had… Read More ›
Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s The Prophet’s Hair
Extensively anthologized, Salman Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair” was initially published in the London Review of Books and the Atlantic. The story was later included in a limited, privately printed edition in 1989, along with a companion piece, “The Free Radio,”… Read More ›
Pre-Raphaelitism
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of authors in the later 1840s through the close of the 1890s who espoused a distinctive artistic philosophy. In form, Pre-Raphaelite short stories exhibit a highly finished style that refl ects and embodies the aesthetic… Read More ›
Analysis of Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
The 10 stories in this collection were written in Laugharne during 1938 and 1939 (though not in the order in which they appear in the volume), and the collection signaled the emergence of Welsh writer Dylan Thomas (1914–53) as a… Read More ›
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