![]() ![]() Published in the New Yorker in 1948, the story is about a village where an annual lottery is drawn. This is the best-known story of the American writer Shirley Jackson, who has inspired, among others, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Joanne Harris. The ‘path’ she walks is a metaphor for life, and for carrying on. There is some ambiguity in the story surrounding whether her grandson is even still alive, making this story potentially a tragedy about one lonely elderly woman’s inability to let go. The journey is subtly infused with suggestions of the epic descent into the underworld found in classical poetry, elevating the protagonist’s journey above the everyday. ![]() The story details the journey an elderly black woman makes into town one Christmas time, in order to get some medicine for her grandson. One of the most celebrated stories by Eudora Welty (1909-2001), first published in the Southern Review in 1937, is ‘A Worn Path’. Sykes mistreats his wife, and resents the fact that she has to clean the clothes of ‘white folks’.īut Delia will take delicious revenge on her husband when he attempts to harm her … Published in 1926, this story by one of the leading African-American female writers of the early twentieth century is set in Florida and focuses on Delia, a washerwoman, and Sykes, her unemployed husband. So Laura sets off to pay her own respects to the dead, in a moving and powerful story about coming to terms with death. ‘The Garden Party’ is a 1920 short story about a rich upper-middle-class family whose daughter, Laura, is shocked when a working-class man from the nearby village dies in an accident.Īlthough Laura insists her mother cancel their garden party as a mark of respect, the rest of her family disagree. The New-Zealand-born Mansfield (1888-1923) never wrote a full-length novel, but she was a prolific writer of short stories whose work was admired by Virginia Woolf, among many others. Katherine Mansfield, ‘ The Garden Party’. But the story is not really ‘about’ the mark on the wall, but rather what it prompts the narrator to think about, muse upon and recollect.Īs well as speculating on what the mark on the wall might be – a small hole, or perhaps a leftover rose leaf – the narrator’s mind wanders to much bigger questions and meditations, such as the nature of life, where Shakespeare found his inspiration, and even what the afterlife might be like.ħ. ![]() This short piece is narrated by someone who recalls noticing a mark on the wall of their house. In many ways, she found her distinctive voice when writing short stories such as this, which was published in 1917. The first two novels the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) published were more conventional than her work that would follow later. ![]()
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