Original place of publication, and source of text in this volume, if different, given.
Definitions, foreign words and phrases, and places, especially in London, are given in the Glossary.
First published in World (25 May 1887), as ‘Lady Alroy’
Reproduced from Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime, The Portrait of Mr W. H. and Other Stories (London: Methuen & Co., 1909)
1. Café de la Paix: One of the most famous cafés in Paris, designed by Charles Garnier of the Opéra Garnier; it was part of the Grand Hôtel built in 1867 to welcome VIPs to the Universal Exhibition.
2. Pentateuch: First five books of the Old Testament, regarded as a unity.
3. the Madeleine… the Bois: In 1806, when the building of the Madeleine church was in progress, Napoleon decided it should be a Temple of Glory dedicated to the Great Army, but Louis XVIII, restored to power in 1814, ordered that it be once more a church. The Bois de Boulogne is a fashionable park and area in Paris.
4. Gioconda: The smiling lady (Italian), another name for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
5. Morning Post: London paper with a reputation for recording the doings of the aristocratic and wealthy, and advocating a forward foreign policy. First London daily, early in the nineteenth century, to print notices of plays, operas and concerts.
First published in Stories, Dreams and Allegories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923)
After Schreiner’s death, Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner gathered her uncollected and unpublished writings. In the preface, he relates ‘The Buddhist Priest’s Wife’ was written ‘at Matjesfontein in 1891 and the following year’. Schreiner wrote of the story: ‘it has given me more bliss than anything else I ever wrote’ (Schreiner to Cronwright, 4 January 1893, in Richard Rive (ed.), Oliver Schreiner Letters 1871–1899 (Oxford University Press, 1988), vol. 1, p. 217). Matjesfontein was a fashionable watering-place, attracting wealthy visitors. Schreiner lived in her own cottage there for five years. During the Second South African War, it supported a base hospital.
First published in A Romance of the Moors (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892)
The title was part of the English Library series; its stated aims were to issue its volumes simultaneously with the appearance of the same works in England and America and to compress works, wherever possible, into one volume. Among its authors were Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Margaret Oliphant, William Dean Howells and Ouida.
1. Columbine: Sweetheart of Harlequin in traditional pantomime.
First published in New England Magazine (January 1892), 647–56
All Gilman stories are reproduced from The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
The magazine began in 1886 as a continuation of The Bay State Monthly, and was initially called the New England Magazine and Bay State Monthly. It absorbed other publications such as the Era magazine from Philadelphia, ceasing publication in 1917.
Shulman notes that the hyphenation of the word ‘wallpaper’ was inconsistent in New England Magazine, and he retained this ‘device… since it underscores both elements of this central symbol’ (p. xxxiii). It has been standardized to ‘wallpaper’ in this volume.
1. it sticketh closer than a brother: ‘A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother’ (Proverbs 18.24, Authorized Version here and below).
2. Weir Mitchell: Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), prominent American neurologist who devised a rest cure for ‘neurasthenic’ and ‘hysterical’ women. He treated Gilman in 1887; see Appendix 2.
3. ‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens: Somewhat resembling the Roman; loosely applied to all the styles of Western Europe, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the appearance of Gothic architecture, and implies that which grew up from the attempts of barbarous people to copy Roman architecture. Literally trembling delirium (Latin); psychotic condition associated with chronic alcoholism, characterized by severe tremor and vivid hallucinations.
4. improve the shining hours: From Isaac Watts (1674–1748), Divine Songs for Children, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief ’ (1715): ‘How doth the little busy bee/Improve each shining hour,/And gather honey all the day/From every opening flower!’
First published in Keynotes (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893)
One of six stories published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews at the Bodley Head publishing firm in Piccadilly, London, under the title of Keynotes, in September 1893. The volume sold over 6,000 copies in its first year, was translated into seven languages and was reprinted eight times by 1898. The second edition (1894), was used by Lane to launch his Keynote Series of short stories and one-volume novels; the thirty-four titles included works by Grant Allen, Ella D’Arcy and Henry Harland. John Lane also published the famous Yellow Book between 1894 and 1897, a quarterly book-length magazine and the main organ of 1890s aestheticism, edited by Harland and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley until his dismissal after four issues in the wake of the Wilde trials.
1. Tanagra: Town in ancient Boeotia, famous for terracotta figurines of the same name (examples were first found in the late nineteenth century).
2. speckled red ‘fairy hats’: Foxgloves. The name ‘foxglove’ is derived from ‘Little Folks’ Glove’, and in fairylore they are believed to be worn by fairies as hats and gloves.
3. stone loach ‘Beardies’: Type of bottom-feeding freshwater fish. The term ‘beardie’ alludes to their barbels around the mouth.
4. Cleopatra sailing down to meet Antony: See Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart, upon the river of Cydnus’ (II.ii.188–9).
5. a Strindberg or a Nietzsche: August Strindberg (1849–1912), Swedish dramatist and novelist, whose plays include The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher, poet and critic, noted especially for his concept of the superman and his rejection of traditional Christian values. His principal works are the Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–91) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
6. qualities… to make a Napoleon: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), Emperor of France 1804–15, finally defeated at Waterloo. Both an enlightened rationalist and superstitious fatalist, his characteristics included striking determination and self-confidence, authoritarianism and intolerance.
First published in Vogue (14 January 1893), and Bayou Folk (1894)
All Chopin stories are reproduced from The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, 1997)
1. La Blanche’s: The white woman (French) – the name has been given to the slave on account of her light complexion. Cf. Négrillon (Black Boy), a few paragraphs later.
First published in Punch (10 and 17 March 1894), 109, 129, with ‘Japanese Fan de Siècle Illustrations by Mortarthurio Whiskerley’ (see Introduction)
1. Norfolk-broad: The term is deliberately confused here, for humorous effect. A Norfolk jacket is a kind of shooting jacket, with a waistband; a Norfolk suit is a suit of breeches; either can be called Norfolks. The Norfolk Broads are shallow lakes in the east of Norfolk, a low-lying county of East England, on the North Sea and the Wash.
2. footlights of the Pavillon Rouge: Pavillion Rouge is a light red wine; Moulin Rouge a Parisian music-hall.
3. KILANYI: Contemporary tableau vivant artist (see Glossary).
4. NAPOLEON. NELSON: See note 6 to Egerton’s ‘A Cross Line’. Horatio, Viscount Nelson (1758–1805), British naval commander during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Killed at Trafalgar after defeating Villeneuve’s fleet. He was blind in one eye.
5. heavenly twins: The title of Sarah Grand’s bestselling and sensational novel of 1893, which caused a stir by its open treatment of venereal disease. The twins of the novel, Angelica and Diavolo, subvert the gender stereotypes which their names denote. See also n. 1 to Daniel’s ‘Jimmy’s Afternoon’.
First published in Pall Mall Magazine (April 1894)
Collected in Wessex Tales in 1896 before being transferred to the 1912 Wessex Edition (Macmillan) of Life’s Little Ironies, from which the story is reproduced
Hardy wrote in the Prefatory Note to the Wessex Edition:
Of the following collection the first story, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, which has hitherto stood in Wessex Tales, has been brought into this volume as being more nearly its place, turning as it does upon a trick of Nature, so to speak, a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations.
Frank Pinion notes in A Thomas Hardy Dictionary (1989) that the story is based on a psychological fantasy Hardy found in Weismann’s Essays on Heredity (1889), vol. 1, pp. 457–61; ‘undoubtedly its imaginings were fanned by Hardy’s love of Mrs Henniker, who lived at Southsea’. Pinion also notes that Robert Trewe is ‘drawn considerably from the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), and the idealization of his lady in The House of Life (1870)’.
1. Solentsea in Upper Wessex: Based on Southsea, Hampshire. Along with the other fictional place names in the story, it forms part of Hardy’s ‘Wessex’, in which all his novels and short stories are set, and in which real places are given fictional names. Budmouth is real-life Weymouth.
2. lymphatic… nervous and sanguine: Alludes to the four humours corresponding to the four temperaments: bilious, lymphatic, sanguine and nervous. During the early stages of the Renaissance, this concept of disease was attacked violently and discarded by many. But later, new factors came to light that reawakened interest in humoral medicine. Scientific enquiry into its theory revived in 1901.
3. ‘a votary of the muse’: Devoted follower of the goddess that inspires the artist; hence, an artist.
4. the Island opposite: The Isle of Wight, across the Solent from Southsea. The ‘fashionable town’ (p. 92) is Ryde.
5. symboliste… décadent: Symbolism was a late-nineteenth-century movement beginning in French and Belgian poetry by Mallarmé, Valéry and Verlaine, while the decadent movement, also associated with fin-de-siècle France, was characterized by the artificial, and epitomized by Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), A Rebours (Against Nature) (1884). Social-purity New Women defined their own writings in direct opposition to the French decadent movement, which they saw as masculine and socially irresponsible. Pinion notes that Hardy read an article on these movements in Revue des Deux Mondes (1 November 1881).
6. The mantle of Elijah: In 1 Kings 19, Elijah puts his cloak on Elisha, who then becomes his disciple.
7. Green Silesian band: Brass band from Silesia, region of central Europe around the upper and middle Oder valley, annexed by Prussia in 1742.
8. ‘Severed Lives’: Cf. Rossetti’s ‘Severed Selves’, in The House of Life, in Poems (1870) and expanded in Ballads and Sonnets (1881).
9. black moustache and imperial… slouched hat: Pinion suggests that Hardy based his description of Trewe on Holman Hunt’s portrait of Rossetti ‘and the “slouched hat” of his later years’. An imperial is a small tuft of hair growing beneath the lower lip, so called because Emperor Napoleon III wore one.
10. Shelley’s scraps… immortality: Poetic fragments left in notebooks by Percy Bysshe Shelley at his death. Quotation from Prometheus Unbound (1820), I, 748–9.
11. sleeping on a poet’s lips: See ‘On a poet’s lips I slept/Dreaming like a love-adept’, Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I, 737–8.
12. ‘Behold, he standeth… our land’: Song of Solomon 2.9, 11–12 (Authorized Version), with a few minor changes. The Song of Solomon, in the form of a collection of love poems, is an allegory or parable either of God’s love for Israel, or for the church, or for the soul that loves Him.
13. God is a jealous God: Exodus 20.5.
14. ‘The hour… was barren’: Rossetti, ‘Stillborn Love’, sonnet 55, in The House of Life.
First published in Discords (London and New York: John Lane, 1894)
1. lint-locked: Cf. lint-haired: flaxen-haired. See Mathilde Blinde’s ‘The Dying Dragoman’, stanza 11, from Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1895): ‘lint-locked babes about her knees / Hark to strange tales of talking trees’.
2. Alhambra: Alhambra Palace Music Hall, Britain’s first music-hall, opened in 1860 on Charing Cross Road in the West End; by 1875 London housed over three hundred music-halls. See ‘At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations’, Savoy 1 (1896), 75–83, by Arthur Symons, decadent, poet and editor of Savoy.
First published in Cosmopolitan 17 (October 1894), 745–57
Reproduced from Emotional Moments (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1908)
1. ‘long, long thoughts’: From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘My Lost Youth’ (1858): ‘and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’; each of the ten stanzas closes with this line.
2. Martha troubled about many things: ‘And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her’ (Luke 10.41–2).
3. Lot’s wife: God rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness. On leaving, Lot’s wife disobeyed God’s express command by turning back and became a pillar of salt (Genesis 19.15–17, 24–6). She is cited as an example to demonstrate the fate that will befall those who cannot abandon their lives at the second coming of Christ (Luke 17.28–33).
4. Tree of Life: In the Garden of Eden the fruit of this tree had the power of conferring eternal life (Genesis 2.9 and 3.22).
5. it is my innings: Metaphor from cricket: it is my turn, opportunity.
6. Greek – form… wanting the spirit part: Classical Greek art, with its mathematically proportioned architecture and sculptures of cold white marble, might be thought heartless.
7. ‘icily regular, splendidly null’: From Tennyson’s Maud (1855), I, 82–3:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null:
Dead perfection, no more; nothing more.
8. Melbury Hill… London, W.: Fictitious… West London.
9. Apelles: Celebrated fourth-century-BC Greek painter.
10. ‘the reptile equal… to the god’: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820), II, 43.
11. Sappho… Diana: Sappho, a Greek lyric poet of early fifth century BC famous for her love poetry addressed to a woman. The others are epitomes of agricultural bounty (Ceres), love (Venus) and chaste athleticism (Diana).
12. Johnson: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), British poet, essayist and lexicographer, celebrated for his dictionary of 1755, the first standard English dictionary. The statue of him in St Paul’s has him wearing a toga.
13. Homer: Idealized portraits of Homer (c. ninth century BC) showed him with a harp and wearing a laurel wreath. According to tradition he was blind.
14. Aesculapius: Greek god of medicine, supposed to have founded the science. On Venus’s visit, was Grand thinking of her visits to the mortal Anchises, to whom she bore Aeneas?
15. sith: Possibly a misspelling of ‘sithe’, meaning sigh, thus suggesting the sigh, or rustle, of silk.
16. ‘ “He is the greatest artist who has the greatest number” ’: See ‘he is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas’, John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1 (1843), Part 1, ch. 2, sect. 9.
First published in Vogue (1894), as ‘The Dream of an Hour’
Reproduced from The Complete Works
First published in Monochromes (London: John Lane, and Boston: Robert Bros., 1895)
1. ‘Guten Tag… Wie geht’s? Und die Herrschaften? Good day… How are you? And the ladies and gentlemen? (German).
2. Herrick… coy: Robert Herrick (1591–1674), ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’ (1648), stanza 1, 13–16:
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost just once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
3. Shakespeare… kissed: From Twelfth Night, II. iii. 51–2: ‘Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty! Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’
4. Nemesis: Greek goddess of retribution and vengeance.
5. ‘ “Wenn ich Dich liebe, was geht’s Dich an” ’: If I love you, what’s it to do with you? (German).
6. Bullier’s: Montparnasse dance-hall. In Henry James’s The American (1877) ch. 17, Madame de Bellegarde tells Newman she wants to go to Bullier’s: ‘the ball in the Latin Quarter, where the students dance with their mistresses. Don’t tell me you have not heard of it.’
7. prix de Rome… Hebe: Prize awarded annually by the French government to students of the fine arts, which entitles them to four years’ study at the Académie de France à Rome. It was instituted by Louis XIV in 1666. Hebe is the Greek goddess of youth.
8. Heine’s poems: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), German romantic poet, most famous for emotionally-charged lyric poetry. (The teacher is fictitious).
9. Halma: European board game that was developed in the late nineteenth century; it soon began to be played in the United States, and by the 1930s was known as Chinese Checkers. In Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), the rebellious Hadria remarks: ‘I will ask Mrs Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games – bézique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline.’
First published in Home Monthly (Pittsburgh) 6 (August 1896), 6–7
1. the Divide: Continental divide – huge mountain range which divides east and west America.
2. Bohemians: Inhabitants of Bohemia, former kingdom of central Europe belonging to the Hapsburgs. In the second half of the nineteenth century a sizeable number of Bohemians emigrated to Texas and other central western states.
First published in The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen and Heard (London: John Lane, and Chicago: Way and Williams, 1896)
1. ‘Have you not love… you so’: Julius Caesar IV. iii. 119–23.
2. ‘If by traduction… blood’: John Dryden, ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew Excellent in the Two Sister-Arts of Poësy and Painting: An Ode’ (1686), 2, 23–6.
3. winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds: The Duke of Wellington is held to have said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.
4. momentary: Here, made up of moments.
5. ‘Thou art… frame thee: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: V. iii. 63–4 continues: ‘Do you know this lady?’
First published in Savoy 1 (1896), 103–8
First published in Symphonies (London and New York: John Lane, 1897)
1. Cleopatra’s Needle: Egyptian obelisk, originally set up at Heliopolis c. 1500 BC, and moved to Thames Embankment in 1878.
2. Christine Nilsson: Swedish soprano (1843–1921), who established operatic fame in Paris, London and New York.
3. Siege of Paris: Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.
4. Aldine classic: Relating to Aldus Manutius (1450–1515), Italian printer, noted for his fine editions of the classics. (He introduced italic type.)
5. index expurgatorius: Authoritative specification of the passages to be expunged or altered in works otherwise permitted to be read by Roman Catholics. The term is frequently used in Britain to cover the ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’, or list of forbidden books.
6. ‘Globe’: The Globe and Traveller (formerly The Globe 1803–22), English newspaper printed and published at the Globe and Traveller Office, London, 1822–1921, then merged in the Evening Standard.
7. turnover: An article that begins in the last column of a newspaper page and continues overleaf. A series of sketches in the Globe were called ‘Turnovers’.
First published in Criterion (USA) (6 March 1897), as ‘Miss McEnders. An Episode’
Reproduced from The Complete Works
1. c’est un propre, celui la!: He’s a right one! (French).
2. Whisky Ring: A national tax-evasion scheme. Distillers bribed government officials so they could retain the excise taxes they had collected, and the officials used the profits to support political activities (including preventing the reduction of the whisky tax), counter investigations and silence journalists. The corruption was uncovered in 1875, and indictments were brought against eighty-six government officials, including President Grant’s private secretary.
First published in Vogue (16 September 1897)
Reproduced from The Complete Works
1. cutting the pages: Pages in an untrimmed journal needed cutting to separate them.
First published in Harmsworth Magazine 3 (September 1898), 319–22
1. long firm frauds: Frauds in which the fraudster simply sets up in business as a wholesaler, and places orders with suppliers with the intention of evading payment. Initially payment is prompt in order to establish creditworthiness, but then larger orders are placed and the delivered goods are promptly sold for what they will fetch.
2. Café Royal: Established in 1865 by a Parisian wine merchant, this chic cafe-restaurant in Regent Street was a focus of the literary and artistic worlds at the turn of the century. In 1894 the night-porter, Marius Martin, was shot and killed there.
3. McKinley tariff: McKinley Tariff Act, shepherded through Congress by William McKinley, later president of the USA (1896–1901), and passed in October 1890. The measure, designed to protect American manufacturers, led to high protective tariffs and proved widely unpopular.
First published in and reproduced from Idler (12 January 1898), 708–14. Collected in Emotional Moments
1. Philip IV… Velasquez period: Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), was court painter to Philip IV of Spain. His portraits are remarkable for their realism and their bravura treatment of the rich fabrics of the clothes of his sitters.
Written in 1898; first published in The Complete Works
‘At the ’Cadian Ball’ was published in Bayou Folk in 1894. It sets the scene for ‘The Storm’, exploring the sexual attraction between Alcée and Calixta. Clarisse declares her love for her cousin Alcée, and on the same evening the disappointed Calixta agrees, in ‘business-like manner’, to marry Bobinôt.
1. Assumption: Louisiana parish south of Baton Rouge and west of New Orleans.
2. Biloxi: City in southern Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico.
First published in and reproduced from Windsor Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly for Men and Women 2 (December 1899), 144–52. Collected in Emotional Moments
Windsor Magazine was published in London, 1895–1939
1. children’s ‘bread and cheese’: The edible young leaves and leaf buds of the hawthorn.
2. a new heaven and a new earth: Allusion to ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away’ (Revelations 21.1).
3. ‘Far flickers… By the North Sea’: A meditation (1880), upon spiritual bleakness, in which Algernon Charles Swinburne argues that time has wrecked Christianity as it had destroyed the worship of Venus and Proserpine.
4. The grand old gardener… long descent: Tennyson, ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’ (1842), stanza 7.
First published in Vogue (19 April 1900)
Reproduced from The Complete Works
First published in Colored American Magazine (1900)
Reproduced from American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy (New York: Penguin, 1998)
1. ‘There’s a divinity… we will’: Shakespeare, Hamlet, V. ii. 10–11.
2. East India: The Indo-Chinese peninsula, and the Malay archipelago, as opposed to the West Indies, the Caribbean Islands.
3. New England Puritans… ‘Mayflower’: In 1608 a mixed group of adventurers and Puritan emigrants (the ‘Pilgrims’), fleeing religious persecution, left England for the Netherlands. They remained there until 1620, when they set sail in the Mayflower and landed on Cape Cod in November of that year.
4. American Academy at Rome: Founded in 1894 as the American School of Architecture in Rome by Charles F. McKim and enlarged in 1897 with the founding of the American Academy in Rome for students of architecture, sculpture and painting.
5. ‘Smiling, frowning… Madeline’: From Tennyson, ‘Madeline’ (1830), stanza 2, ll. 18–20.
6. ‘Whom the gods love die young’: Classical proverb (Menander, Dis Exapaton, fragment 4), quoted by Byron, Don Juan (1821), IV, 12.
7. ‘all went merry as a marriage bell’: From Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), III, 21.
8. ‘A wet sheet… on the lea’: Poem by Allen Cunningham (1784–1842); included in his collection The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern (1825), it became one of the best known of British sea songs.
9. suffering all things, enduring all things: Cf. the love which St Paul describes as patient, kind, not rude, not boastful, ‘Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things’ (1 Corinthians 13: 7).
10. Dumas: Alexandre Dumas (1802–70), French novelist and playwright, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (both 1844–5). Through his grandmother, Dumas could claim African descent.
First appeared in Illustrated London News (17 August 1901), 235–7
Reproduced from The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories (London: Archibald Constable, 1906)
1. remained childless: Differential class fertility was a growing concern at this time among the middle and upper classes.
2. Mudie: The famous circulating library, the main branch of which was opened in Oxford Street in 1852. The strict moral censure of Charles Edward Mudie (1818–90) caused outrage, and was fought by various writers, notably George Moore.
First published in Everybody’s Magazine (USA) (1902), 346–52
First published as ‘The Marriage Feast’ in the copyright edition of The Untilled Field (Leipzig, 1903); revised as ‘The Wedding Feast’ in the 1914 edition
Reproduced from The Untilled Field (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976)
1. The fat… beside the lean: See Genesis 41. The dream is used to indicate a cycle of lean and fat years; it counsels sensible economy to smooth out the good and bad times.
2. Unionist: Supporter (Protestant) of the Union with Britain. The common religious bond between landlords and tenants and a fair system of tenants’ rights produced comparative harmony.
3. black Protestant: Term used of Protestant Irish who supported Ulster Rule, or ‘Black Ulster’. Some Catholics in Ireland still use ‘Black Irish’ to describe the Protestant Irish.
First published in Harper’s Monthly (New York) 105 (August 1902), 342–55
Reproduced from the first British publication, The Descent of Man and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1904)
1. new dispensation: Note the religious undertones: within a Christian context, a system or code of prescriptions for life and conduct regarded as of divine origin. The implication is that these will differ from the ‘old’ (Old Testament) dispensation. The ‘new’ were more forgiving and more case-related than the old, which would lose the spirit for the law. However, in spite of this claim, the new dispensation turns out to differ little from the old.
2. ‘statutory’: Divorce laws varied from state to state, but the main grounds were adultery, desertion and extreme cruelty. In 1813 in New York, where the story is set, the legislature rejected its commission’s recommendation that desertion be made a ground for divorce and instead enacted a separation statute for wives – extended to husbands in 1880. In 1827, the legislature rejected habitual drunkenness as grounds for divorce. In 1830 it enacted an annulment statute authorizing annulments for nonage, bigamy, insanity, fraud or force, and physical incapacity.
Holograph draft written in 1906, in the Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library; first published in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989)
1. Temple: Building in London that now houses two of the main law societies; it belonged originally to the Templars, the military religious order Knights of the Temple of Solomon, founded by Crusaders in Jerusalem in the twelfth century.
2. first class: Highest classification of university degree.
3. Anatole France… Walter Pater: France (Anatole François Thibault, 1844– 1924), writer and critic, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921; Pater (1839–94), writer, critic and aesthete, and author of Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (1895).
4. Lord Mayo was assassinated: The sixth earl of Mayo, who was appointed Viceroy of India in 1868, was assassinated in the Adaman Islands in 1872.
5. Leiscetter: This name is unclear in the draft.
6. Park… statue of Achilles: Bronze statue of Achilles, in the south-eastern corner of Hyde Park; erected in 1822, it recalls the Duke of Wellington’s victories.
7. ladies whom Romney painted: The elegant clothing of the women whose portraits George Romney (1734–1802) painted would have been out of place, and date, at the Tristrams’ party.
8. ‘the facts of life’: (Stark) realities of existence, brute fact; the colloquial use as a euphemism for ‘knowledge of human sexual functions’ does not appear to be intended here.
First published in Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987)
All Mansfield stories are reproduced from The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin, 1981)
1. Leves Amores: Quotation from a medieval Latin love lyric, in which a poet describes the eyes of the beloved: ‘There sit Venus, and nimble Cupids, and in the centre Desire herself ’ (Oxford Book of Latin Verse, ed. H. W. Garrod, 1912, no. 324). ‘Levis’ means light and nimble, but also capricious or fickle; Amor is both love and its personification in Cupid. The phrase, taken out of its original context, is thus ambiguous.
Written in 1908; first published in Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1924)
Reproduced from The Collected Stories
1. Lyons: The first of the famous Lyons Corner Houses opened in 1908 in London’s West End.
2. Anna Lombard: New Woman novel billed as ‘the most popular novel of the day’ (London: John Lang, 1902), by Victoria Cross [Cory Vivien], author of The Woman Who Didn’t, a response to Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did. Set in India, Anna loves two men at once; Literature commented that she was ‘so entirely non-moral as to think nothing of living with both. The daughter of a general and the heiress of a thousand conventions, she is sometimes mysteriously Greek, sometimes Oriental, and sometimes Machiavellian. She is generally wicked, and always interesting.’ W. T. Stead, in Review of Reviews, wrote: ‘a novel to get people thinking. It is a bold, brilliant, defiant presentation of a phase of the relations of the sexes which I do not remember ever having seen treated with the same freedom, delicacy and audacity.’ (Comments taken from the 1902 edition.)
3. Sapolio… Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline: Popular scouring soap, and Lamplough’s Effervescing Pyretic Saline, a medicine to reduce fever, produced in England, and exported to the USA. Cf. ‘that comforter of my childhood, Lamplough’s pyretic saline’, in Fanny Van de Grift and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter (1885).
4. Carlton… Parma violets: A luxurious hotel in Haymarket, which opened in 1899. Violets from Parma, city in northern Italy. Cf. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): ‘that evening, at half-past eight, dressed in exquisite elegance and with a small bunch of Parma violets in his buttonhole, Dorian Gray was introduced ceremoniously by servants, into the lounge of Lady Narborough’.
First published in Rebel Women (London: Women’s Freedom League, 1910)
1. pink newspapers: Racing papers.
2. penny Conservative paper: The Standard, a penny morning paper, staunchly supportive of the Conservative party.
3. ‘L’homme oisif… l’homme oisif’: The idle person kills time; time kills the idle person (French).
4. jet trimming: Jet beads were a popular trimming for women’s clothing during the Victorian and Edwardian period. See, for example, Isabel A. Mallon, ‘The Woman of Forty’, Ladies’ Home Journal (September 1893): ‘the received best dress for the woman past forty was, for a number of years, a very severe black silk one, made without any decoration unless it should be a flat jet trimming’.
First published in Rebel Women
First published in Forerunner 2:9 (September 1911), 1–6
Reproduced from The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
Forerunner began in 1909.
This story makes an interesting comparison with George Eliot’s Romola (1863). In Impress (1 December 1894, p. 5), Gilman praised Eliot, remarking upon ‘that sweeping breadth of vision, deep insight, and wide scholarship which make the author of Romola so great a power in literature’.
1. Calvinist… of God’: Follower of Calvinism, a system of theological thought found in the doctrinal expressions of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Calvinism flourished in the Puritan culture of New England. Unitarian: Believing that God is one being and rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, Unitarians were not perceived to be as strict as Calvinists. ‘for the glory of God’: Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803), New England minister, maintained a heightened sense of God’s sovereignty by insisting that people should be willing even ‘to be damned for the glory of God’. Hopkins was the leader of an extreme Calvinist movement known as the New Divinity or Hopkinsianism.
First published in In a German Pension (London: Constable, 1911)
Reproduced from The Collected Stories
1. Schlingen: Village just to the south of the spa-village Wörishofen (Bad Wörishofen from 1920), in southern Bavaria, centre for hydropathy, and famous for the Kneipp-Kur, a water cure developed by the nineteenth-century cleric Sebastian Kneipp (1821–97).
2. ‘cure guests’: Patients at the spa.
3. ‘O Welt… wunderbar’: ‘O world, how wonderful you are’ (German); song unidentified.
4. tailor-made: Literally, clothing made by a tailor to fit exactly (British). Here, Frau Kellermann responds again on a literal plane to the Advanced Lady’s comments, this time choosing to misinterpret her figurative language, and unsettling her.
5. Mindelbau: There is a small village called Mindelau, just to the south-west of Mindelheim, a historical town in southern Bavaria. See also Mansfield’s ‘At Lehman’s’, earlier in the series In a German Pension, set in Mindelbau.
6. ‘The friends thou hast… steel’: Hamlet, I. iii. 62–3.
First published in Votes for Women (16 May 1913), 471
1. George Lloyd: Allusion to Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908–15) and Prime Minister (1916–22).
First published in Mr Jones and the Governess (London: Women’s Freedom League, 1913)
Votes for Women reviewed Mr Jones and the Governess (13 October 1913, p. 5), and chose ‘The Woman in the Corner’ as the best story, declining to give away the plot.
The Criminal Law Amendment (White Slave Traffic) Bill, later the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1912), sought to make more effective the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which had raised the age of consent to 16, and introduced tighter laws against brothel-keeping, in the wake of W. T. Stead’s campaign (see, for example, Hansard (1912), vol. 39, cols 571–627, and vol. 45, cols 699–734). Arthur Lee, who proposed the 1912 Bill, emphasized that it was aimed not at prostitutes – ‘the unfortunate women who are the victims of commercialized vice’ – but at ‘those sinister creatures who batten upon commercialized vice, and who make a profitable business out of kidnapping, decoying, and ruining, and subsequently turning into prostitutes, unwilling girls’ (Hansard, vol. 39, col. 574). Lee added: ‘I feel very strongly as an opponent of Women’s Suffrage that we men are under a special obligation to pay heed to the appeal made to us as men by the united voice of women on behalf of the most miserable and unfortunate of their sex’ (Ibid.). He emphasized the urgency of the Bill ‘during the Christmas shopping, when an unusually large number of young girls are about the streets’ (Hansard, vol. 45, col. 705). The House laid out the grounds for punishment by private whipping, in addition to six months’ imprisonment, agreeing that nobody would be flogged ‘except after trial by jury’ (Hansard, vol. 45, col. 733). The liberal Josiah Wedgwood, a staunch supporter of individual autonomy, in the tradition of J. S. Mill, and an ardent opponent of eugenics, objected to the insertion ‘if a male’, declaring
I should rather like to know whether it is desirable to make this distinction at all between the sexes… the crime is just the same in regard to women, and why are we not to flog women also… nearly all the stories which we know so well from letters to the papers or in the columns of the sensational Press deal with women. It is the woman who decoys away for ever the girl who assists her when she faints. It is the woman who is waiting in her carriage at Euston station to catch the unwary servant girl, and take her away in her carriage and pair to a brothel in Soho. In all these cases it is the woman who is the villain of the piece. (Hansard, vol. 45, cols. 733–44)
His objection was carried. In the story Colmore points out that women played a central role in luring girls into prostitution. The Bill was given royal consent on 13 December 1912.
1. White Slave Traffic: ‘White slavery’ was commonly used to describe sweated labour; for example, see Introduction, n. 110. However, ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ by the sex reformer and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead, had referred to pimps and procuresses as ‘slave traders’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885) and to the trade in female child prostitutes as a ‘slave market’. By the early twentieth century, the phrase ‘white slave traffic’ was commonly used to describe the traffic in young prostitutes, and was part of the initial title of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (see above).
2. St Paul: See, for example, 1 Timothy 5. 14: ‘I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.’
First published in Votes for Women (10 January 1913), 214
1. the old, old story of a bad man and his prey: See, published in the same year, Christabel Pankhurst, Plain Facts about a Great Evil (The Great Scourge and How to End It) (London: Women’s Social and Political Union, 1913). Pankhurst alleged that between 75 and 80 per cent of all men were infected with gonorrhoea; her solution was votes for women and chastity for men. New Women literature was actively engaged in the debates over syphilis and the sexual double standard; see especially Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and her short story ‘Eugenia’ (1908). Syphilitic children appear in The Heavenly Twins, and Emma Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894); Hardy’s Jude junior in Jude the Obscure (1894–5) bears the signs of a syphilitic child, notably premature ageing.
2. Holloway: Prison, opened in 1852 – with three wings for men and one for women, became a remand prison at the end of the nineteenth century and by then was for women only.
First published in Beasts and Super-Beasts (London: John Lane, 1914)
Reproduced from The Complete Works of Saki (London: Penguin, 1982)
1. she-wolf: In legend, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were suckled by a she-wolf after they had been abandoned. A sixth-century BC statue of the wolf, now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, has become an emblem of the city.
2. shabby women: In legend, the early Romans, needing to increase their population, seized a number of women from the Sabines, a tribe living to the north-east of Rome. It was a popular subject for painters; see, for example, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Rape of the Sabine Women. in the National Gallery, London.
First published in Physical Culture (July 1914), 31–4
Reproduced from The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
Physical Culture was founded in 1899 by the entrepreneur, body-builder and publisher Bernaar Macfadden. It sold for five cents and was a huge success, preaching the virtues of healthy living, warning readers against tobacco, alcohol and coffee, and advocating sex as natural, healthy and enjoyable. It was heavily informed by developing ideas about fitness.
1. Noah… Hindu scriptures: Noah serves here as an epitome of ‘Old Testament’ (ancient, out-of-date) values. While lecturing his brother Bharata on how to govern the kingdom, Lord Rama says women are not to be trusted: Ramayana 2:100; see also, for example, Rig Veda 10:86:6.
First published in Bath College Domestic Subjects (January 1928), 6–10
The editorial on p. 3 of the old student’s magazine reads: ‘All members will realize the honour paid to the college by Madame Sarah Grand in contributing the article on page 6 and feel gratefully indebted to her for so very kindly responding to the invitation.’
1. Poor Mrs Dombey: The allusion is to the first Mrs Dombey, in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1844–6), who appears only in the first chapter, giving birth to her son. Grand’s narrator empathizes with Mrs Dombey, who, we repeatedly hear, did not make an effort. In the words of Dr Parker Peps, ‘the system of our patient has sustained a shock, from which it can only hope to rally by a great and strong… and vigorous effort’. He, the family physician and her sister-in-law Louisa stress that if Mrs Dombey can’t make that effort, she will die. Moments before Mrs Dombey dies, Louisa tells her: ‘it’s necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps a great and very painful effort which you are not disposed to make; but this is a world of effort you know, Fanny, and we must never yield, when so much depends upon us.’ Mrs Dombey is soon forgotten; like Grand’s narrator, she has no story (Penguin, 1985, ch. 1).
First published in Forerunner 4 (October 1913), 271
Reproduced from The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
1. alienists: Persons who practise alienism, the study and treatment of mental illness.