The art of writing a short story can be barely noticed by a reader—such is the quality with which they are usually written. It is a difficult trade, an unforgiving discipline, but for those who master it the rewards are many. In this series of works by our greatest female writers we bring you a selection of those we consider the best.
In this volume we bring you the classics “A Dill Pickle” by Katherine Mansfield, “The Storm” by Kate Chopin, and “The Sexton’s Hero” by Elizabeth Gaskell. These stories are read for you by the renowned actresses Eve Karpf and Liza Ross.
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Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and settled in Europe to finish her education. She published her first short fiction in The New Age, then in Rhythm, whose editor, the British writer and critic John Middleton Murry, she soon married. Her writing contributed to the development of the stream of consciousness technique and to the modernist use of multiple viewpoints, and her style has had a powerful influence on the development of the short story form.
Kate Chopin (1851–1904) was born in St. Louis. After marrying, she moved to Louisiana, where she raised six children. Chopin earned acclaim for her finely crafted short stories about the Creole and Cajun people of Louisiana. But her novel, The Awakening, was condemned for its controversial themes, which foreshadowed later feminist literature.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist and short-story writer born in London and raised in Knutsford, Cheshire, which became the model for village settings in her novels. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister. Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was immensely popular and brought her to the attention of Charles Dickens, who solicited her work for his periodical, Household Words, for which she wrote the series subsequently reprinted as Cranford.
Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who.
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.