Through most of the nineteenth century, the novel was the dominant fictive genre in the British Isles. Virginia Woolf was one of the earlier practitioners of the short story in England, and her work in "The Duchess and the Jeweller" resembles that of Joseph Conrad in terms of the way in which an individual character is examined in some psychological depth.

The social context is closer to that of such continental authors as Guy de Maupassant, while the powerful descriptive passages and dialogue are reminiscent of some of D. H. Lawrence's stories in his first collection, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914).