This enchanting story by Alice Adams is about friendship, love (for people and places), and marriage. The narrator recalls how, after she and her mother moved from Boston to North Carolina, a lifelong friendship developed after she fell permanently in love with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside. She forms a strong bond with each member of the family, and later learns that their shared fondness for her may have been the only thing that kept them together. Themes include friendship, mother-daughter relationships, marriage, city vs. country living, the beauty of nature. More…
Filboid Studge
This story is from Saki is a spoof on modern advertising. A businessman who had invested all his money into a failed breakfast food requests help from an impoverished artist who wants to marry his daughter. The artist gives the product an unappetising name and promotes it with a poster of celebrities in Hell clamouring for the unpalatable dish “they cannot buy now”. Sales take off, and the businessman sells the company and marries his daughter to someone a “vast deal higher” than the hapless artist. Themes include despair, the power of advertising, branding (appeal to duty/guilt), social class, ingratitude/betrayal. More…
The Mill
The major theme of his story by H. E. Bates is exploitation: economic exploitation by parents who place their daughter in servitude, and sexual exploitation by her employer who rapes her on an almost daily basis. The most puzzling aspect of the story is the girl’s compliant, almost robot-like, demeanor, perhaps brought about by her father’s dictatorial bullying. It only when the girl arrives home after her employer’s son, the only man who has shown her any kindness, realises and tells her she is pregnant, that her eyes come to life with tears. Other themes include isolation, naivety, jealousy, fear. More…
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
In this mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle, an English squire from a highly respected family asks Sherlock Holmes for help. His new bride has been receiving messages written in a strange code that appear to terrify her. The woman, an American, refuses to discuss her past, and a condition of her marrying him was that he must promise never to ask about it. Holmes takes on the case and easily cracks the code, but doesn’t move quickly enough to prevent a murder. Themes include honor, shame, secretiveness, fear, unrequited love, obsession, crime and justice. More…
The Adulterous Woman
The adultery in this story from Albert Camus is not of the sexual kind. For the married protagonist, the vast expanse of the Algerian desert puts into perspective something she already knew but had refused to face. Although she has a caring and possibly still loving husband, married life has become mundane and, through lack of communication, lonely. With both existentialist and feminist undertones, her epiphany on the rampart provides a brief escape from misery and the realization that life could offer so much more. Themes: lack of fulfillment, loneliness, natural splendor, freedom, finding meaning and purpose in life. More…