Women and Fiction

Description

From Kate Chopin’s turn-of-the-century Lousiana, to Gertrude Stein’s war-time Paris, to Alice Walker’s modern-day America, here are twenty-six short stories by the finest women writers of the twentieth century. These well-known and well-loved authors people their stories with vibrant female characters, from all over the world and all walks of life. Separately, each of these stories bears the mark of a skilled writer. Together, they celebrate woman in her many roles—as daughter, mother, worker, wife, lover, sister, and friend. In Tillie Olsen’s classic, “I Stand Here Ironing,” a single mother considers her success in raising a daughter. In Eudora Welty’s “The Worn Path,” an African-American grandmother meets with grace the impudence of a young, white man. In Alice Munro’s “The Office,” a wife who has too many distractions to write at home rents a room in town, only to be constantly interrupted by her landlord. Superbly written, and at once poignant and ironic, these insightful stories capture the essence of being a woman—in all its similarity, and all its diversity.

Introduction
Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Story of an Hour
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The Other Two
Willa Cather (1873-1947): A Wagner Matinée
Colette (1873-1947): The Secret Woman
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): The New Dress
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923): The Garden Party
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980): Rope
Kay Boyle (1902-1992): Winter Night
Eudora Welty (1909-2001): A Worn Path
Hortense Calisher (1911- ): The Scream on Fifty-Seventh Street
Ann Petry (1911-1997): Like a Winding Sheet
Mary Lavin (1912-1996): In a Café
Tillie Olsen (1913- ): I Stand Here Ironing
Maeve Brennan (1917-1993): The Eldest Child
Carson McCullers (1917-1967): Wunderkind
Doris Lessing (1919- ): To Room Nineteen
Grace Paley (1922- ): An Interest in Life
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964): Revelation
Jean Stubbs (1926- ): Cousin Lewis
Edna O’Brien (1930- ): A Journey
Alice Munro (1931- ): The Office
Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ): In the Region of Ice
Margaret Drabble (1939- ): The Gifts of War
Julie Hayden (1939-1981): Day-Old Baby Rats
Alice Walker (1944- ): Everyday Use

Bibliography

US