Some Short Stories

Some Short Stories is a gathered selection of short fiction by Henry James, collecting a handful of his stronger short stories into a single accessible volume. The specific contents vary across editions but typically draw from across his career, with the famous middle period pieces alongside one or two of the early or late tales.

The stories most often anthologized in such a selection volume include Daisy Miller, the famous 1878 novella of an American girl in Europe. The Real Thing, from 1892, about a portrait painter who hires an aristocratic English couple as models and finds them less convincing than his usual professional models. The Beast in the Jungle, the late masterpiece from 1903, in which a man waits all his life for a great event that never comes. The Aspern Papers, the novella about a literary scholar trying to obtain the love letters of a dead poet from his aged former mistress. The Turn of the Screw, the famous ghost story from 1898 about a young governess at a country house with two strange children.

What such a selection demonstrates is how varied James's short fiction was across nearly fifty years of work. The early stories are typically clearer in surface and more direct in plot. The middle period stories develop the psychological compression that became his signature. The late stories add the long elaborated sentence structure of the late style. Reading several of them in sequence in a single volume gives a clearer sense of his development than working through the collections in publication order.

The book runs whatever number of pages the particular selection requires, typically three to four hundred. For readers new to James, this kind of selection volume is the friendliest place to start. It allows the reader to find the period and the kind of story that suits them before committing to one of the longer novels or to a complete collection. It pairs naturally with the full editions of the major collections such as The Aspern Papers and Other Stories or The Lesson of the Master.