Serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round (January–February 1863), Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work details the devastating effects of a tragic secret shared by Edward Wilkins, a widowed lawyer in the rural town of Hamley, his daughter… Read More ›
Originally subtitled “A Study,” this novella was first published by Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf, in the Cornhill Magazine. The choice of a British press cost Henry James his American rights. The sheer amount of pirated versions, however,… Read More ›
This story by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) first appeared in the influential collection Keynotes. Published in 1893 by Elin Mathews and John Lane, it was the first book in a series of 33 volumes, 13 of which would… Read More ›
Cross Channel was Julian Barnes’s first book of short fiction. It collects 10 stories about the English experience of France over 350 years, from the 17th to the early 21st century. Five of these tales were first published in the… Read More ›
An episodic novel of linked stories set in Cranford, a fictitious country town in northern England. First serialized in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens, between December 1851 and May 1853, Cranford appeared in volume form in… Read More ›
Cousin Phyllis is one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s later works and one in which she returns to the rural Cheshire of her youth. Cousin Phyllis was first published by George Smith in his Cornhill Magazine in four monthly parts from November… Read More ›
Originally published in British Vogue, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” is one of the nine pieces contained in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of traditional fairy tales. In particular, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon”… Read More ›
One of Rudyard Kipling’s many stories of life among noncommissioned soldiers in India, “The Courting of Dinah Shadd” was first published in Harper’s Weekly in the United States in 1890. It also gave its name to the volume of short… Read More ›
In the title story of Helen Simpson’s fourth collection, a science teacher takes her regular lunchtime stroll around Hampstead Heath. This is her “constitutional,” a reassuringly old-fashioned concept, far removed from power-walking, jogging, or similar goal-oriented forms of exercise: “The… Read More ›
One of Angela Carter‘s most famous short stories, “The Company of Wolves” was first published in the innovative and imaginative 1979 collection of fairy-tale themed stories, The Bloody Chamber. “The Company of Wolves” skillfully interweaves peasant superstitions, such as old… Read More ›
This story collected in the posthumously published Dracula’s Guest is about the power of the past to haunt the present. Bram Stoker also makes use of the plot device of the fatal return, a popular narrative in many 19th-century texts…. Read More ›
A literary sensation on the strength of his breakout collection of interwoven short stories—1991’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity—Will Self continued to impress with 1992’s Cock and Bull, a pair of novellas that take conventional notions of gender and turn… Read More ›
The decline of British power and influence in the international sphere following World War II was paralleled by substantial changes in life in Britain. The cherished, if idealistic, version of England as a “green and pleasant land” was subject to… Read More ›
The first of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a fairy-tale-like ghost story that has contributed much to the formation of the Christmas story as a genre. Written in October… Read More ›
This short novel is one of the products of Rudyard Kipling’s residence in the United States from 1892 to 1896. What Kipling described as a “boy’s story” was first published in serial form in McClure’s Magazine in the United States… Read More ›
While still a 23- year-old medical student, before creating the wildly popular character of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Captain of the Pole-Star.” Conan Doyle’s tale is a ghost story set aboard an arctic expedition, narrated by John… Read More ›
First published in the Court and Society Review, “The Canterville Ghost,” subtitled “a Hylo-Idealistic Romance,” concerns an American minister, Mr. Hiram B. Otis, who buys a haunted English mansion from Lord Canterville. When warned about the ghost by Canterville, Mr…. Read More ›
Entered in the “red notebook” (a notebook containing drafts of 9 stories) and dated September 1934, “The Burning Baby” was published in Contemporary Poetry and Prose in May 1936. The story is characteristic of Thomas’s early prose work with its… Read More ›
George Eliot described her short story “Brother Jacob” (written in 1860, published in the Cornhill 1864) as a “slight tale.” “Brother Jacob,” a story about deception, imperial venture, and self-interest, was the first piece written after her true identity had… Read More ›
This story is from A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss. In a number of very favorable reviews of this collection, critics noted Kennedy’s predilection for characters who can be moved only by extreme circumstances, as if their responses have been dulled… Read More ›
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