In his preface to the first collection of all of Virginia Woolf's short fiction, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), Leonard Woolf recalled that she had decided to publish a new edition of her short fiction in 1940, including the stories that she had written during the 1930s for magazines like Harper's Bazaar, The Forum and The Athenaeum. "The Duchess and the Jeweller" was originally rejected for publication due to its derogatory references to the main character who was described with several anti-semitic terms. Woolf removed or adjusted the most obviously offensive words, and the story was eventually published in 1938.

The story was included, along with six of the eight stories and sketches from Monday or Tuesday, plus six others from magazines in the 1930s and five unpublished stories, only one of which ("The Searchlight") Woolf had revised at all. Leonard Woolf felt that this was...