Short Fiction
Mary Shelley (1797–1851), 1829
Mary Shelley's short stories: revenge, shipwrecks, immortals and social climbers—gothic invention in miniature, with the same fierce eye for guilt and longing as Frankenstein. A dark, lyrical current runs through these tales, with melancholy voices and sudden turns into dread, madness and remembered guilt.
Feels like dread, melancholy and wonder. About freedom, memory and madness.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy Gothic short fiction that prizes atmosphere, moral unease and a strong narrative voice over neat resolutions. The period prose and occasional gift-book brevity can make a few pieces feel more like sketches than fully developed tales.
Why read it
These stories show Shelley working at small scale, turning revenge, shipwrecks and immortality into sharp tests of conscience. They give you the Gothic imagination of Frankenstein in compact, varied forms.
Pages from the book
Three hundred years old, and still checking for grey hairs.
Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a grey hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age. The calm she showed the world was not the same as being well.
Do not mistake me; I never was really mad. I was always conscious of my state when my wild thoughts seemed to drive me to insanity, and never betrayed them to aught but silence and solitude. The people around me saw nothing of all this. They only saw a poor girl broken in spirit, who spoke in a low and gentle voice, and from underneath whose downcast lids tears would sometimes steal which she strove to hide. One who loved to be alone, and shrunk from observation; who never smiled; oh, no! I never smiled—and that was all. The peculiar cruelty of news that hasn't arrived yet.
What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? Sometimes in the midst of tears, or worse, amidst the convulsive gaspings of despair, we reproach ourselves for influencing the eternal fates by our gloomy anticipations: then, if a smile wreathe the mourner’s quivering lip, it is arrested by a throb of agony. Alas! are not the dark tresses of the young painted grey, the full cheek of beauty delved with sad lines by the spirits of such hours? Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope. Mary Shelley.Shelley kept writing short fiction for the gift-books that paid her bills after Frankenstein; her stories appeared alongside engravings in annuals like The Keepsake.
Books that feel like this
More by Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Short Fiction for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy Gothic short fiction that prizes atmosphere, moral unease and a strong narrative voice over neat resolutions. The period prose and occasional gift-book brevity can make a few pieces feel more like sketches than fully developed tales.
- What is Short Fiction like?
- A dark, lyrical current runs through these tales, with melancholy voices and sudden turns into dread, madness and remembered guilt. Feels like dread, melancholy and wonder. About freedom, memory and madness.
- What should I read after Short Fiction?
- If you liked Short Fiction, try Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu), The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe) and The King in Yellow (Robert W. Chambers).
A taste of the feed
What fear does to the body before the mind can decide.
Why did I remain silent and motionless while such an outrage was being committed? If, instead of being a very nervous girl, preoccupied with an undefinable terror of that wicked woman, I had possessed courage and presence of mind, I dare say I might have given an alarm, and escaped from the room without the slightest risk. But so it was; I could no more stir than the bird who, cowering under its ivy, sees the white owl sailing back and forward under its predatory cruise.
Uncle Silas · Sheridan Le Fanu
A midnight tap sounds like a visitor until the mind supplies otherwise.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”
The Raven · Edgar Allan Poe
A house after a death keeps the shape of the people who left it.
Long before anybody else was astir he arose and stole softly downstairs. The sunlight was stealing in at every crevice, and flashing in long streaks across the darkened rooms. The dining-room into which he looked struck chill and cheerless in the dark yellow light which came through the lowered blinds. He remembered that it had the same appearance when his father lay dead in the house; now, as then, everything seemed ghastly and unreal; the very chairs standing as their occupants had left them the night before seemed to be indulging in some dark communication of ideas.
The Lady of the Barge · W. W. Jacobs
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