Author Archives
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Analysis of Jane Austen’s Love and Friendship
This parody of sentimental fiction is Jane Austen’s best-known juvenile work. It was written in 1790, when she was only 14, but did not appear in print until 1922. Austen’s novella is a mock epistolary romance consisting of 15 letters… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s Love among the Haystacks
Although “Love among the Haystacks” was published posthumously in November 1930, two letters date its composition between July 30, 1908, and November 7, 1911. In the first letter, D. H. Lawrence writes at length to Blanche Jennings about his fortnight’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jean Rhys’s The Lotus
“The Lotus” was first published in Art and Literature in 1967 and later published in the collection Tigers Are Better Looking in 1968. Although according to Jean Rhys’s letters most of the stories in the collection were ready in 1945,… Read More ›
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Analysis of P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
This is one of a number of Wodehouse’s stories to feature the dimwitted aristocrat Clarence Emsworth. This character—a favorite with Wodehouse fans—first appeared in “The Custody of the Pumpkin” in the Saturday Evening Post in 1924. Other stories featuring Emsworth—including… Read More ›
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Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
Subtitled “A Study of Duty,” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” was published in a volume called Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories. Oscar Wilde had previously sold it in 1887 to the magazine Court and Society Review. Lord Arthur stands… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
This is the bleak title novella in a collection by Alan Sillitoe. Although Sillitoe dislikes the label, the story is invariably grouped with other works by the so-called Angry Young Men of the period, works “dominated by a mood of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch
Elizabeth Gaskell’s story “Lois the Witch” was first published in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in October 1859. Set during the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692, the story offers a fi ctionalized chronicle of Lois Barclay, a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh
“Lizzie Leigh” is a story of a fallen woman that was probably begun in the late 1830s (Uglow, 125) but was published in Charles Dicken’s Household Words from March 30 to April 13, 1850. The story has received a good… Read More ›
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Analysis of Graham Greene’s A Little Place off the Edgware Road
This story was first published in Graham Greene’s debut volume of short stories, The Basement Room (1935). The piece emerged again in 1947 in Nineteen Stories and then again in 1954 in Twenty-One Stories. The Basement Room received a cool… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Joyce’s A Little Cloud
“A Little Cloud” was one of the three late additions to the 15 stories that make up the collection Dubliners. James Joyce submitted the first 12 stories to a London publishing firm as early as 1905. When the printers objected… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil
This story by George Eliot was first published in the July 1859 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. Latimer, its protagonist and narrator, begins his tale near the end of his life, when he is suffering from acute angina pectoris— a heart… Read More ›
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Analysis of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter
For six months in 1921 and four months in 1925, W. Somerset Maugham traveled throughout the British-ruled Malay States, befriending the civil servants, planters, officials, and hostesses of the Malaysian colonies—and gathering abundant material for his fiction. “The Letter,” one… Read More ›
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Analysis of Martin Amis’s Let Me Count the Times
Masculinity in crisis has been a recurrent topic in Martin Amis’s fiction. The character John Self, that notorious example of unredeemed machismo in Money (1984) immediately comes to mind, but other characters, like Guy Clinch (London Fields, 1989), a prototype… Read More ›
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Analysis of Graham Swift’s Learning to Swim
The title story in the collection Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) was originally published in 1978 and is one of Graham Swift’s bestknown tales. It is representative of this author’s short fiction: The plot focuses on domestic strife,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s The Lagoon
“The Lagoon” was one of the first short stories that Joseph Conrad wrote and was his second to be published. The story is set in the Malay Archipelago, which also features in the novels Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast… Read More ›
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Analysis of Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love
“The Lady of the House of Love,” a short story, was first published in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. Although The Bloody Chamber is composed mainly of retellings of fairy tales, “The Lady of the House” is a… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords
John Lane published George Egerton’s (Mary Chavelita Dunne’s) Keynotes in 1893 and Discords a year later, heading up what would become his new series, “Keynotes,” and bringing Egerton fame and notoriety. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Egerton’s Keynotes collection typified the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens
“Kew Gardens” was first published as a stand-alone work on May 12, 1919, by Hogarth Press in an initial run of 150 copies. This was quickly followed in June of the same year by a second edition of 500 copies…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Karain: A Memory
One of Joseph Conrad’s early Malay stories, “Karain: A Memory” was first published in the November issue of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1897 and subsequently appeared in Tales of Unrest (1898). A story of betrayal and exile and a twofold frame… Read More ›
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Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s Je ne parle pas français
A pivotal story in Katherine Mansfield’s career, “Je ne parle pas français” is also a key modernist short story. The piece was composed over two weeks in the last year of World War I, at the time when Mansfield was… Read More ›
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