Best of Women's Short Stories, Volume I

This rich collection of stories explores the experiences and complexities of womanhood through a wide array of lenses. Edith Wharton's "Atrophy" tells the heartbreaking story of Nora Fenway and her clandestine lover, now dying. A wife embraces fashionable "Bloomsbury" values yet sacrifices the most important thing of all in Katherine Mansfield's "Marriage a la Mode." A young lover's dilemma is beautifully portrayed in Charlotte Mew's powerful poetic narrative "Some Ways of Love, " while William Locke's "Ladies in Lavender" tells the tale of two aging sisters who become romantically involved with a stranger. In "The Yellow Wallpaper, " Charlotte Perkins Gilman recounts a woman's terrifying descent into madness. Also included are stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Lamb, and Mary Braddon. Sometimes joyful, sometimes sad, and always absorbing, the stories in this remarkable anthology are interpreted by Harriet Walter with tenderness and sensitivity.