‘The Widow and the Parrot’ is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known works. But then how many people familiar with The Waves or Mrs Dalloway are even aware that Woolf wrote a short story for children? Woolf wrote ‘The Widow and the Parrot’ in the early 1920s for the family […]
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) was not a prolific poet, but her body of work is a substantial one and marks her out as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. However, the newcomer may find it difficult to find a good starting-point. With Sylvia Plath we might start with […]
‘Babylon Revisited’ is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1931. Dealing with some of the prominent themes of Fitzgerald’s most famous work, The Great Gatsby, ‘Babylon Revisited’ is about alienation, guilt, dissipation, and making amends, among other themes.
John Donne (1572-1631) is one of the most important and influential poets in the English language. He is widely regarded as the first metaphysical poet, whose work combined then-contemporary developments in astronomy and cosmology to create a new poetic language with which poets could describe love, relationships, and a host […]
Writers of short stories have said a great deal about relationships of various kinds, and although the novel may be the preferred form for teasing out the complexities and conflicts of a long-term relationship, the short-story form can also provide writers with enough space to pinpoint a particular critical moment […]