Recent Posts - page 53
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Analysis of Angela Carter’s Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene
“Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene” first appeared in FMR Magazine in February 1992. It was subsequently published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, the short story collection that appeared the year after Angela Carter’s death in 1992, and again in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Martin Amis’s The Immortals
This story by Martin Amis appeared in the 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters, comprising five short stories and an introductory essay, “Thinkability,” relating the author’s observations about the nuclear threat’s chilling effects on intellectual and spiritual life. Amis later referred to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Hunted Down
First published in the New York Ledger in three parts in 1859, this story is one of the few by Charles Dickens that is widely regarded as Detective Fiction. It is narrated by Mr. Sampson, the retired chief manager of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Susan Hill’s How Soon Can I Leave?
Susan Hill’s 1973 widely anthologized short story “How Soon Can I Leave?” relates the relationship of Miss Roscommon and Miss Bartlett, two unmarried women living in the coastal town of Mountsea. Hill’s simple, straightforward style of writing is evident in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Muriel Spark’s The House of the Famous Poet
Originally published in the New Yorker, “The House of the Famous Poet” is set in 1944 during the shelling of London and follows the narrator as she travels on the night train from Edinburgh to London to resume work at… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
D. H. Lawrence tried unsuccessfully to get the English Review to publish “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” written in 1917 and originally titled “The Miracle.” However, in 1921 he revised the story, retitled it “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” and included it… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Trevor’s The Hill Bachelors
Mary Fitzgerald-Holt has noted that The Hill Bachelors represents a marked change of style from William Trevor’s previous collections. “Gone are the dramatic moments of confrontation, the sometimes strident exposures of painful truths” (174), she writes. Indeed, this collection has… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s The Highland Widow
This story by the celebrated Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) first appeared as part of the collection Chronicles of the Canongate. Here, Chrystal Croftangry, the narrator of the collection, retells the widow’s story from the memorandum of a late… Read More ›
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Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House
In 1921 Virginia Woolf published her first collection of short stories, titled Monday or Tuesday, which included “A Haunted House” as the opening piece. Although she continued to publish short fiction, this proved to be the only collection of such… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
The essay “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924) describes Joseph Conrad as a schoolboy amusing classmates by pointing to Africa on a map and declaring, “When I grow up I shall go there.” Eighteen years later, in 1890, Conrad obtained a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
Originally slated to appear in 1847, “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,” the fifth and last instalment of the Christmas book series was delayed because of Charles Dickens’s exhaustion at maintaining the serialization of Dombey and Son (1846–48). In… Read More ›
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Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince
Arguably the most popular of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, “The Happy Prince” is the first story in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which was published in 1888. The narrative, which has been favorably compared to the work of Hans… Read More ›
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Analysis of G. K. Chesterton’s The Hammer of God
A short story by G. K. Chesterton originally published in The Story-Teller magazine in 1910, published in America’s The Saturday Evening Post in 1919 as “A Bolt from the Blue” and collected in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Half Brothers
Published in the collection Round the Sofa and Other Tales (1859), “The Half Brothers” is, as its title suggests, about two brothers, and it recalls those Old Testament brothers divided by enmity: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea
The first story in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s sensation collection In a Glass Darkly. This collection of stories forms a unified whole, held together by a frame story that resurfaces at the beginning and end of each consecutive episode. Written… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Kelman’s The Good Times
The Good Times is a sequence of 20 first-person stories documenting the inner lives of working-class men and boys in Scotland. James Kelman portrays his characters empathetically in their common struggle to survive poverty, boredom, and failure with their self-respect… Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth Taylor’s Good-bye, Good-bye
Elizabeth Taylor’s poignant short story “Good-bye, Good-bye” was first published in the magazine Woman and Beauty and then collected in The Blush and Other Stories in 1958. The story’s title points to its theme of two painful farewells. These leavetakings… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aldous Huxley’s The Gioconda Smile
Originally published in the April 1921 issue of The English Review and later included by Aldous Huxley in Mortal Coils (1922), “The Gioconda Smile” is inspired by the story of Harold Greenwood, a man who had been acquitted of poisoning… Read More ›
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Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden-Party
Katherine Mansfield incorporated literary Modernism into the genre of the short story in The Garden-Party and Other Stories, published in 1922. The title story, written in 1921, emphasizes mood, emotion, and relationships of characters rather than plot and reveals the… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox
D. H. Lawrence wrote the first version of “The Fox” in December 1918. This version of the story was a straightforward tale about two women, whose lesbian partnership is implicit. Jill Banford is diffident and timid, whereas the more physical… Read More ›
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