“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 ›
“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 ›
“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 ›
“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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
“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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
This short story was published in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1941 collection Look at All Those Roses. “The Needlecase” recounts the arrival of Miss Fox, a young seamstress, at the home of the Forresters, a formerly aristocratic family that no longer has… Read More ›
Charlotte Brontë wrote “Napoleon and the Spectre” in 1833, when she was 17. The story is taken from the manuscript of her novella The Green Dwarf. In its original context, the tale is overheard being told by “a little dapper… Read More ›
“Mysterious Kôr” was first published in the 1944 volume of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing. The next year Elizabeth Bowen placed the story last in her collection of wartime stories The Demon Lover, which was published in 1946 in the… Read More ›
First published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words from June 19 until September 25, 1858 and reprinted in Round the Sofa in 1859, “My Lady Ludlow” is presented as one of a “chain” of stories connected by a prologue. As… Read More ›
Doris Lessing (1919-2013) once called her sequence of novels Children of Violence “a study of the individual conscience in its relation with the collective” (quoted in Whittaker, 37). More often than not, it is female figures that she depicts in… Read More ›
“Mrs. Bathurst” is one of the most ingeniously crafted and enigmatic stories by Rudyard Kipling. Originally published in the Windsor Magazine as the fourth of a set of six stories, each featuring the character Petty- Officer Pyecroft, the story is… Read More ›
This story is reprinted in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection of weird tales, In a Glass Darkly (1872), which purports to consist of nonfictional case studies first collected by Dr. Martin Hesselius and then edited and published by his literary… Read More ›
This gothic short story by Mary Shelley (1797– 1851), the author of Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus (1818), explores the implications of immortality. In the story, alchemy, or artifice, overrides natural law and makes the impossible dream of immortality possible…. Read More ›
“Morpho Eugenia” is the first of two novellas published together as Angels and Insects in 1992 (the other being “The Conjugal Angel”). Both novellas reflect and develop A. S. Byatt’s enduring interest in the Victorian period: Her previous novel, the… Read More ›
“Monkey Nuts” was first published in the Sovereign, in August 1922, and was included by D. H. Lawrence in England, My England and Other Stories published in October the same year. It has appeared in a number of anthologies since… Read More ›
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