One of the first books produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Monday or Tuesday, a collection of short stories, is representative of Woolf’s style, relying on her ranging interior narrative voice, the stream-of-consciousness technique for which she and… Read More ›
British Literature
Modernist Short Stories
The term modernism is used to define a loose literary movement of the early 20th century; its dates are subject to question, but some critics situate it between about 1890 and the outbreak of World War II. It can also… Read More ›
Analysis of William Golding’s Miss Pulkinhorn
Written in 1951 but not published until 1960, when it appeared in the magazine Encounter, “Miss Pulkinhorn,” by Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding (1911–93), was published in book form only after a dramatized version was broadcast on BBC radio in… Read More ›
Analysis of Radclyffe Hall’s Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself
A story exploring sexual inversion first published in 1934 in a collection with the same title. Radclyffe Hall (the pen name of Maguerite Radclyffe Hall [1883–1943]) wrote “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” in 1926 before beginning work on The Well of… Read More ›
Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill
Written in 1920 and included in Katherine Mansfield’s short story collection The Garden-Party and Other Stories, “Miss Brill” narrates a day in the life of an aging spinster, Miss Brill, who perceives life as a play and is aware of… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s A Mere Interlude
A fine example of Thomas Hardy’s skillful use of irony, this story alerts readers to the danger of making hasty decisions. The heroine, Baptista Trewthen, attempts to create a better life for herself through marriage, but she encounters unusual obstacles… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
Thomas Hardy first published this story as “The Melancholy Hussar” in the Bristol Times and Mirror in 1890 and revised and reprinted it several times, notably in Life’s Little Ironies (1894) and in the Wessex Edition of his Wessex Tales… Read More ›
Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot: A Tale
“Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot” was originally written by Mary Shelley (1797– 1851) as a gift for Laurette Tighe, the daughter of Mrs. Mason (Lady Mountcashell), one of the Shelleys’ acquaintances in Pisa in 1820, and the former pupil of… Read More ›
Analysis of Saki’s A Matter of Sentiment
The general plot of Saki’s “A Matter of Sentiment” is quite similar to that of a number of his previous short stories: A group of familiar characters gathers under the auspices of a particularly stuffy English hostess and undertakes a… Read More ›
Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King
Written when Rudyard Kipling was in his early 20s, “The Man Who Would Be King” was first published in India in 1888. It appeared as the last of four stories collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. The… Read More ›
Analysis of H. G. Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles
“The Man Who Could Work Miracles” by H. G. Wells was published with the subtitle “A Pantoum in Prose” in the Illustrated London News in the summer 1898 edition, before being included in Tales of Space and Time in 1899…. Read More ›
Analysis of Frank O’Connor’s The Man of the House
“The Man of the House” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1949 and has been anthologized in the collections More Short Stories by Frank O’Connor (1953), Traveller’s Samples (1951), and Collected Stories (1981). This short story was one of… Read More ›
Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Manchester Marriage
This story was first published in the extra Christmas number of Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens) and was republished in Elizabeth Gaskell’s collection Right at Last and Other Tales (1860). It tells the story of Alice Openshaw, who moves… Read More ›
Victorian Magazines
For many, perhaps most, Victorian readers, fiction was packaged within the pages of a magazine or newspaper rather than between the covers of a book. During the 1830s and 1850s the reduction and eventual abolition of the notorious stamp duty… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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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