This anthology brings together twenty-eight lively and readable short stories by nineteenth-century women writers, including gothic tales to romances, detective fiction and ghost stories. Containing short fiction by well-known authors such as: * Maria Edgeworth * Mary Shelley * Elizabeth Gaskell * Margaret Oliphant Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Women also includes: * a scholarly introduction * biographies for each of the authors * full explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading * a critical commentary, publication details and historical context * a full and wide-ranging bibliography The bibliography of resources and further reading will enable those interested in pursuing research on any author or topic to do so with ease, and a thematic index will enable teachers to select material best suited to their courses.

In spite of the importance of the idea of the 'tale' within Romantic-era literature, short fiction of the period has received little attention from critics. Contextualizing British short fiction within the broader framework of early nineteenth-century print culture, Tim Killick argues that authors and publishers sought to present short fiction in book-length volumes as a way of competing with the novel as a legitimate and prestigious genre. Beginning with an overview of the development of short fiction through the late eighteenth century and analysis of the publishing conditions for the genre, including its appearance in magazines and annuals, Killick shows how Washington Irving's hugely popular collections set the stage for British writers. Subsequent chapters consider the stories and sketches of writers as diverse as Mary Russell Mitford and James Hogg, as well as didactic short fiction by authors such as Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. His book makes a convincing case for the evolution of short fiction into a self-conscious, intentionally modern form, with its own techniques and imperatives, separate from those of the novel.

Intended as a text for undergraduate students of English for their course on Women’s Writings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, this compact and well-organized book provides both the history of the development of the short story in America and Britain and a comprehensive introduction to the modes on critical practices based on feminist thinking. It takes into account the strategies used by women writers, and discusses the politics of reception and production keeping especially the gender issue in mind. The text is divided into three parts—Part I: Introduction—containing two chapters that deal with the development of the American short story and the resurgence of radical feminism in America. These provide the historical and the feminist frame within which the short stories by the Anglo American Women’s Writers should be read. Part II gives four short stories: Kate Chopin—The Story of An Hour; Charlotte Perkins Gilman—The Yellow Wallpaper; Willa Cather—Coming, Aphrodite!; and Katherine Mansfield—Bliss. Each short story is preceded by a critical introduction, detailed references for further reading, and a biographical time line. Part III comprises three critical essays which provide sharp insights into the period in which the four women writers were writing. This book will be treasured not only by students but also by those who wish to study critically the feminist writings of the period. In addition, it will enrich readers’ understanding of American and British literary history and culture. The critical introduction to each short story traces the development of the form from its origins, both historically and in terms of female literary contributions to its development. The chapter on Radical Feminism is mapped in the context of social, political and cultural development. The book provides historical, literary and biographical contexts of the writers and their short stories.

This collection of short stories is ideal for use with Key stage 3 and 4 students, to help them prepare for GCSE English Language and English Literature. Organised by genre and featuring a variety of short stories from a range of authors, with contextual information, this collection showcases the breadth of 19th-century writing.

Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.

This book addresses a critically neglected genre used by women writers from Gaskell to Woolf to complicate Victorian and modernist notions of gender and social space. Their innovative short stories ask Britons to reconsider where women could live, how they could be identified, and whether they could be contained.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

«America is now wholly given over to a d - d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash...» Taking Hawthorne's famous 1855 complaint about women writers as a starting point for consideration, Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form is a collection of fourteen critical essays about the short fiction of British and American women writers. This anthology takes a feminist approach, examining the liberating possibilities for women writers of the form of the short story, a genre often associated with alienation or subversion (the writer Frank O'Connor describes the form as marginal or «outlaw»). Covering the work of selected women writers from the 1850s through the late twentieth century, this collection includes essays on well-known authors such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, alongside essays on Harriett Prescott Spofford, Ruth Stewart, L. T. Meade, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, and Lydia Davis, less-known authors whose stories offer rich ground for consideration.

This book re-locates Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘smaller stories’ in the literary and cultural context of the nineteenth century. While Gaskell is recognised as one of the major novelists of her time, the short stories that make up a large proportion of her published work have not yet received the critical attention they deserve. This study re-claims them as an indispensable part of her literary output that enables us to better contextualize and assess her achievement holistically as a highly-skilled woman of letters. The periodicals in which Gaskell’s shorter pieces were published offer a microcosm of nineteenth-century society, and Gaskell took full advantage of the medium to apply a consistent and barbed challenge to cultural and gendered constructs of roles and social behaviour. Although her eminently readable prose still flows easily in her short stories, it is less likely to elide the sharp corners of domestic violence, the disabling experiences of women, the pain of death and loss, and the complications of family life.

The Reader's Guide to Women's Studies is a searching and analytical description of the most prominent and influential works written in the now universal field of women's studies. Some 200 scholars have contributed to the project which adopts a multi-layered approach allowing for comprehensive treatment of its subject matter. Entries range from very broad themes such as "Health: General Works" to entries on specific individuals or more focused topics such as "Doctors."