A Bit on the Side, William Trevor’s collection of twelve short stories appeared when he was 76 years old, and it has been suggested that the tone of the stories betrays Trevor’s age. A distaste for modern, superficial culture is… Read More ›
Literature
Analysis of Michèle Roberts’s The Bishop’s Lunch
“The Bishop’s Lunch” appears in During Mother’s Absence, a collection of Michèle Roberts’s short stories that was first published in 1993. The collection may be considered an unofficial sequel to Roberts’s novel Daughters of the House (1992), which was short-listed… Read More ›
Analysis of Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City
The first of Margaret Oliphant’s popular series Stories of the Seen and Unseen, “A Beleaguered City” belongs to the subgenre of Victorian-era supernatural tales, such as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . In “A Beleaguered City” Oliphant uses different narrators… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle
First published in Henry James’s 1902 collection, The Better Sort, “The Beast in the Jungle” is among the most anthologized of his short stories. Often read as a fable about failure, the tale of John Marcher is also seen as… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá
“The Beach of Falesá” is a story of colonialism in the South Seas that shocked many of Robert Louis Stevenson’s admirers when it was first published in the Illustrated London News (1892). It is related in the first person by… Read More ›
Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s At the End of the Passage
“At the End of the Passage,” one of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian tales, was first serialized in 1890 and appeared in the 1891 collection Life’s Handicap. It deals with themes familiar to Kipling’s Indian fiction: the grueling day-to-day work involved in… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers
One of the most enduringly popular of Henry James’s shorter fictions, The Aspern Papers was first published in serial form in the American journal Atlantic from March to May 1888. Its central theme concerns the attempt by the story’s anonymous… Read More ›
Analysis of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden
Ashenden, a collection of 16 interconnected stories, is based on W. Somerset Maugham’s own experiences as a British secret agent in Switzerland and Russia during World War I. When first published, the stories seemed so authentic that Winston Churchill accused… Read More ›
Analysis of E. M. Forster’s Arthur Snatchfold
Although E. M. Forster produced sufficient material in his writing career for three collections of short stories, he published only two collections in his lifetime: The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). The Life to Come and Other… Read More ›
Analysis of John Donne’s Poems
The traditional dichotomy between Jack Donne and Dr. Donne, despite John Donne’s own authority for it, is essentially false. In the seventeenth century context, the work of Donne constitutes a fundamental unity. Conventional wisdom may expect devotional poetry from a… Read More ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby
One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners, which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its… Read More ›
Analysis of Margaret Elphinstone’s An Apple from a Tree and Other Early Stories
Magic subversion and ecological agenda coexist in Margaret Elphinstone’s collection of short stories. Quirky creatures populate the stories, which retain a strong humanity, even when cast in the fantastic genre. Human characters often hallucinate to grasp the unintelligible, and their… Read More ›
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Antheap
Originally published in Doris Lessing’s second collection of short fiction, Five (1953), “The Antheap” relates the growth from childhood to young adulthood of Tommy, the son of white settlers in southern Africa. As elsewhere in her short fiction (e.g., “The… Read More ›
Analysis of A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects
Published in 1992, Angels and Insects continues A. S. Byatt’s interest in the Victorian era, which was established with her Booker Prize–winning novel Possession: A Romance (1990). The two novellas published as Angels and Insects are “Morpho Eugenia” and “The… Read More ›
Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Amy Foster
First published in the Illustrated London News in 1901, “Amy Foster” was republished in Typhoon, and Other Tales in 1903. According to biographer Frederic Karl, Joseph Conrad’s idea for the subject of the story came from his friend and sometime… Read More ›
Analysis of Vernon Lee’s Amour Dure
A supernatural tale first published in Murray’s Magazine and then included in Vernon Lee’s collection Hauntings in 1890. It is one of the best-known examples of the Victorian ghost story and has been reprinted in many anthologies. The story spans… Read More ›
Analysis of All Hail the New Puritans
According to their introduction, the editors of this collection of 15 short stories sought to bring together a group of “like-minded writers and set them a challenge.” These contributors are Matthew Branton, Candida Clark, Anna Davis, Geoff Dyer, Bo Fowler,… Read More ›
Analysis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
These 12 detective stories were first published as a series in the Strand Magazine, 1891–92, and then as a collection by George Newnes in 1892. After the novellas A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890), Sir… Read More ›
Analysis of Toby Litt’s Adventures in Capitalism
Adventures in Capitalism was Toby Litt’s debut collection and, according to Malcolm Bradbury, foretold a novelist whose “fresh contemporary style . . . will sing in the ears of a generation” (3). The collection is divided into two sections, “Early… Read More ›
Analysis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band
This locked-room mystery was published in February 1892 in the Strand Magazine, a popular illustrated periodical aimed at a middle-class family audience. By the time contemporaries encountered “The Speckled Band,” Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson were familiar from… Read More ›
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