The most relevant feature of "The Other Woman" having to do with literary precedents is the technique referred to earlier, the enclosed narrative. That is, a story with a loose outer frame which has the potential for a story or which constitutes an actual story. Broadly, the term includes one or more of the following features of a loose outer frame of reference: the recorder of the events, the commentator on the events, or the compiler of the data on the events. A somewhat different definition of the framing or enclosure technique, applied to the short story, is given in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., by J. A. Cuddon and rev. by C. E. Preston (1999): "A frame story is one which contains either another tale, a story within a story, or a series of stories."

The nineteenth-century writers produced a...