SOURCE: Hanson, Clare. “The Lifted Veil: Women and Short Fiction in the 1880s and 1890s.” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 135-42.

In the following essay, Hanson argues that female short-story writers of the late nineteenth century reoriented the conventional narrative construction of the feminine.

The short stories of the 1880s and 1890s were written in a period of emphasis on the moment and on the ephemeral, a spell of relaxation from the developmental narrative forms of the nineteenth century. It has often been argued that the popularity of the short form at this time was connected with the fact that this was a period of rapid social change, but Elaine Showalter makes the suggestion that the short story form may also have had a special significance for women writers:

For late-nineteenth-century women writers in particular, the short story offered flexibility and freedom from the traditional plots of the three-decker...