“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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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