By Nava Atlas | On November 9, 2020 | Updated June 15, 2026 | Comments (5)
Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 – 1958) is considered the first staged play (1916) by a Black American woman, and the first to be performed by an all-Black cast. Grimké may have been better known as a poet, but Rachel, her three-act drama, was a singular achievements for these “firsts.”
Angelina Weld Grimké (not to be confused with her white abolitionist great-aunt, Angelina Grimké Weld), was a talented yet lonely figure in the field of literature. Ann Allen Shockley, in Afro-American Women Writers (1991) wrote of her: Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On October 14, 2020 | Updated May 3, 2025 | Comments (0)
“Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923) is a much-anthologized short story by this New Zealand-born author considered a master of the genre. It was first published in The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1920.
Miss Brill is an elderly woman who has created her own illusory world. Some of the themes in this classic short story include loneliness, aging, and alienation. It’s considered a modernist piece and is replete with symbolism rather than plot.
Here is some supplementary information on Miss Brill: Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On September 20, 2020 | Updated May 2, 2025 | Comments (0)
“The Mark on the Wall,” one of Virginia Woolf‘s early short stories, was published in her first collection of fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It was a prime example of the kind of complex (and sometimes perplexing) modernist short stories that she produced especially in her first years of publishing.
Before getting to the full text of the story, here is a link to an excellent summary and analysis of the story, as well as Leonard Woolf’s foreword to A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, an updated collection that also included this story, published posthumously in 1944. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 18, 2020 | Updated August 29, 2025 | Comments (0)
“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was published in her first collection of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It later appeared as the lead story of another collection of stories, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), after Woolf’s death.
Presented here is the text of “A Haunted House” in full. First, here are links to a pair of analyses of this classic short story: Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 17, 2020 | Updated September 20, 2020 | Comments (0)
“Kew Gardens” is one of Virginia Woolf‘s earliest short stories, written around 1917 and published in her first collection of fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). It later appeared in another collection of the authors stories, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), after Woolf’s death.
“Kew Gardens” is titled after the famous gardens of London and takes place on a July day. It’s considered modernist, as it favors the capture of moments rather than revolving around a tight plot. Though it’s one of Woolf’s best known stories, and one of the most anthologized, it’s also one of her most elusive. Read More→
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