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 ›
British Literature
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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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