Description
This box is filled up with stories about the bittersweetness of love: about all-encompassing love but also broken hearts, vanity and evil, thoughtfulness and disappointment. Four short stories written by some of our most beloved authors of all time.
The box contains four pocket-sized books:
Mary Shelley – The Trial of love
Two friends, Angeline and Faustina, are reunited after a couple of years apart. A lot has happened during this time: Angeline has met a man, but the two have been forced to make a promise to keep their love secret and not meet for a whole year. However, when he suddenly turns up much earlier than planned, their love is put to the test once again.
British author Mary Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein. Her short story The Trial of Love from 1834 is considered by many to be the story of the love triangle between Shelley’s husband, her half-sister and Mary Shelley herself during their joint stay in Italy in 1818.
Leo Tolstoy – After the Dance
Like Leo Tolstoy’s most famous works War and Peace and Anna Karenina, this too is a story about Russia, love and, ultimately, about human nature.
After the Dance was written as a protest against human cruelty and tyranny. The short story was originally intended to be published in a book to help the Jews affected by the pogrom in Chisinau in 1903. But Tolstoy didn’t finish it in time and so the story wasn’t published until 1911, the year after his death.
Oscar Wilde – The nightingale and Rose & The Sphinx without a Secret
In the melancholy story The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde turns to the superficiality of society and man, a theme that also reappears in the novel for which he is perhaps best known today, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The short story is considered a response to H.C. Andersen’s saga The Nightingale. Common to the stories is the critique of the authors’ contemporaries, but Wilde objects to Andersen’s view of sacrifice and his preference for the natural over the artificial and allows his story to take a completely different turn.
Another sample of Oscar Wilde’s short prose can be found in The Sphinx without a Secret, the story of a woman who seemingly harbours a dark secret.
Virginia Woolf – The Legacy
When the prominent politician Gilbert Clandon is forced to take care of the property after his wife’s sudden death, he is faced with a legacy with unforeseen consequences.
Like several of Virginia Woolf’s short stories, The Legacy is a study of human selfishness and self-preoccupation and touches on issues such as jealousy, gender roles, identity and equality. Woolf’s strong conviction that fiction should not package reality as an absolute truth made her a master at shaping life as it could be experienced by all kinds of people.
And just like in several of Woolf’s short stories, The Legacy ends with a twist.
