By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The String Quartet’, which was published in Virginia Woolf’s short-story collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921, is one of her strongest evocations of music and its links to memory and imagination. You can read ‘The String Quartet’ here before proceeding to our summary of the story’s ‘plot’ below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Blue and Green’ is a pair of short sketches – each only one paragraph in length – which appeared in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 collection, Monday or Tuesday. These two sketches are less ‘stories’ in the traditional sense than impressionistic prose-poems; nevertheless, below we reproduce both ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, and attempt a short ‘summary’ of each.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the adventures of the Puritan swordsman, Solomon Kane
Some writers have just one great character in them. Conan Doyle created a range of memorable characters, from Professor Challenger to Sir Nigel Loring of the Hundred Years’ War, but his name is now linked to one of his creations above all others. Mary Shelley wrote the first post-apocalyptic novel among other works of fiction, but her name now means ‘Frankenstein’. And for many, the name Robert E. Howard, if it conjures a fictional character at all, summons ‘Conan the Barbarian’ or ‘Conan of Cimmeria’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
This is a somewhat unseasonal post for us, appearing in July as it is. But we’ve recently turned our thoughts towards Christmas literature for a whole host of reasons, so thought we’d offer ten of the greatest short stories about Christmas. These are stories set around Christmas time, or during the Christmas holidays, which reflect the jubilation as well as the turmoil of that season.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Prelude’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s longest, and finest, short stories. Centring on the Burnell family as they move house in New Zealand, ‘Prelude’ is the opening story in Katherine Mansfield’s first ‘mature’ collection of fiction, Bliss and Other Stories (1920), although the story had first been published two years earlier. Below, we attempt a brief summary of the ‘plot’ of ‘Prelude’, which can be read in full here.