Author Archives
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Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Pornography
The short story “Pornography” opens Ian McEwan’s second collection of short stories, In between the Sheets (1978). The story returns to the familiar themes of McEwan’s earlier collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites (1972), with its focus on the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s The Poor Relation’s Story
One of two short stories by Charles Dickens that appeared in the Christmas number of Household Words in 1852, A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. The story was later published by Chapman and Hall in Christmas Stories (1859),… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ella D’Arcy’s The Pleasure-Pilgrim
When Ella D’Arcy’s collection of short stories Monochromes, which includes “The Pleasure-Pilgrim,” was published in 1895, she was a fixture of the 1890s London literary scene. She was an editor of the provocative journal The Yellow Book and was compared… Read More ›
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Analysis of Michèle Roberts’s Playing Sardines
Playing Sardines (2001), the collection in which the short story of the same name appears, is Michèle Roberts’s second independently authored collection of short stories. Chronologically and thematically it may be considered alongside Roberts’s most recent novels, including The Looking… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills
The first edition of Plain Tales from the Hills contains 40 stories written by Rudyard Kipling between 1884 and 1887. Most of the stories were first published in the Civil and Military Gazette, of which Kipling was assistant editor, in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Ping
“Ping” was first written in French (titled “Bing”) in 1966 and was translated by the author in 1967. It came at a time when Samuel Beckett was pushing the boundaries of what was possible in both prose and drama and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw
Written when Rudyard Kipling was 19, this story first appeared in the 1885 Quartette, the Christmas annual of the Gazette. An ironic and haunting ghost story, “The Phantom Rickshaw” has a message: Using people, specifically women, as mere sex objects… Read More ›
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Analysis of Saki’s The Penance
One of Saki’s [H. H. Munro’s] tragicomic explorations of the gap between imaginative children and conventional adults, “The Penance” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette on September 24, 1910. Octavian Ruttle has recently killed the neighboring children’s tabby cat, which… Read More ›
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Analysis of Doris Lessing’s Our Friend Judith
A short story originally published in Partisan Review (1960) and later collected in Doris Lessing’s volume of short stories A Man and Two Women (1963). Written more than a decade before the mainstream feminist movement and two years before her… Read More ›
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Analysis of E. M. Forster’s The Other Side of the Hedge
This short story was first published in the liberal monthly Independent Review in 1904. Later it was reprinted in E. M. Forster’s first short story collection, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911), and in The Collected Tales of E…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Ostler
“The Ostler” was originally published in the special Christmas issue of Household Words in 1855, and Wilkie Collins later expanded this supernatural story for inclusion in The Queen of Hearts (1859) as “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman.” Collins… Read More ›
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Analysis of A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss
“Original Bliss” takes as its theme a situation prevalent in many of A. L. Kennedy’s short stories: A frustrated female character, hemmed in by the mundane routines of her life, must enter a period of struggle in order to maintain… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s On the Western Circuit
“On the Western Circuit” addresses many of the same questions of sexuality, propriety, and class structure that dominate much of Thomas Hardy’s longer fiction, but it does so from a fundamentally different perspective. Like such novels as Tess of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of V. S. Pritchett’s On the Edge of the Cliff
“On the Edge of the Cliff” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1978 and was the title story for a collection of nine short stories published in 1979, in the latter part of V. S. Pritchett’s writing career; “On… Read More ›
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Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga
One of Doris Lessing’s many stories concerning relations between white settlers in Southern Africa and the black communities they have displaced, “The Old Chief Mshlanga” was first published in 1964 in African Stories. The story recounts the awakening of a… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums
A short story published in the English Review in 1911, shortly after D. H. Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, and subsequently republished in revised form in Lawrence’s first, and perhaps most important, collection of short stories, The Prussian Officer… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro
“Not Not While the Giro” is the title story of James Kelman’s breakthrough collection. Waiting for his giro (unemployment allowance) the hero of this freewheeling black comedy epitomizes the qualities of Kelman’s writing that led one early reviewer to proclaim… Read More ›
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Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s Nights
Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), an American-born author who worked under the penname H. D., did much of her writing while living in London, England. She was initially best known for her poetry despite an abundant corpus of plays and fiction and… Read More ›
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New Woman
A term coined by British feminist Sarah Grand in an 1894 essay to describe an independent woman who seeks achievement and self-fulfilment beyond the realm of marriage and family. According to Grand, the New Woman “proclaimed for herself what was… Read More ›
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Analysis of Arnold Bennett’s The News of the Engagement
A lighthearted story published in Arnold Bennett’s The Grim Smile of the Five Towns. The story is narrated by a young man, Philip, who travels from London to his childhood home in Bursely, one of the five towns indicated in… Read More ›
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