A Selection From the Writings of Guy De Maupassant

A Selection From the Writings of Guy de Maupassant is an English language anthology of pieces drawn from across Maupassant’s short fiction. The collection was published in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in one of the many translations and selections of Maupassant that appeared after his death in 1893 made his work fully available to the English speaking public. Maupassant had written about three hundred short stories and several novels in his short working life from the late 1870s to his collapse in 1892, and selection volumes of this kind helped English readers find their way into a body of work that was otherwise hard to navigate.

The pieces in the selection are typically drawn from the most famous of his stories. These usually include Boule de Suif, his first major success from 1880, set during the Franco Prussian War and following a prostitute and a group of bourgeois passengers in a coach as they try to escape Rouen. They include The Necklace, his most famous short story, in which a young Parisian woman borrows a diamond necklace, loses it, and spends ten years working with her husband to pay off the cost of a replacement, only to discover at the end that the original necklace was paste. They include Mademoiselle Fifi, A Family Affair, and other staples of the Maupassant short story anthologies.

What makes Maupassant still readable after more than a century is the combination of psychological compression and surface clarity. He worked from a method he had learned partly from his teacher Flaubert, which was to write in a plain unornamented prose that let the situation speak for itself. The stories typically run a few thousand words, take a single situation, and turn on a small moment of recognition or reversal that gives the whole piece its meaning. There is no surplus material. The selection volumes work well precisely because the individual pieces are so self contained.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read a story or two at a time. For readers new to Maupassant, this kind of selection is the friendliest place to start. It pairs naturally with the larger Conard or Pléiade collections of the complete short fiction for readers who want everything, and with Bel Ami and Pierre and Jean for the novels.