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  The Secret of the Barbican

  J. S. Fletcher

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  Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian golden age of the short story.The Secret of the Barbican is the story of a small-town solicitor who on a chance visit to a local museum in a distant town discovers a set of rare siege coins. He instantly recognizes them as the set of coins which had been stolen from his own town corporation many years previously. He immediately sets out to investigate...and the thief's trail takes him to some quite extraordinary places....

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  Sentimental Exorcisms

  David Derry

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  A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An English lit undergraduate finds himself besieged by increasingly urgent voyeuristic desires, and soon finds himself pressed to the glass, firm in his belief that the only way to exorcise his demon is to identify its essential objectives and achieve them. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure.
   
  
   
  Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they can’t quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.
   
  
   
  'Derry specializes in the most delightfully self-unaware characters. These are delicious portrayals of delusion.' – Uptown
   
  'Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexual-repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin.' – Prairie Fire
   
  'Arrestingly witty.' – Vue Magazine

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  How Pearl Button was Kidnapped

  Katherine Mansfield

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  Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.'How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped' is the romantic story of a very small child who is abducted by two female travelers and taken away to the sea.A Red Door Consulting production.

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  A Lady of Many Charms and Other...

  Heidi Wessman Kneale

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  Three tales--one past, one present, one future--explore what it is to love and just how far someone would go for the love of another.  
   
  The Past: Lady Daphne Collister is unimpressed with her fellow magic-wielding debutantes. She finds their methods overbearing. Surely there was a better way of finding a noble husband in Regency England?  
   
  The Present: Ellie loves Josh. Josh barely knows Ellie exists. For her, it is not enough to sit behind him at school every day. What must Ellie do to get Josh to notice her? How about a love spell? After all, what could go wrong?  
   
  The Future: Leo and his co-worker Katerina have fallen in love. Secretly, of course, for office romance is illegal and all marriages are strictly regulated. There’s only one exception: the Valentine Raffle. But to win at love, Leo and Katerina may need to cheat the system... 

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  The Emerald Storm - An Ethan...

  William Dietrich

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  The year is 1803. Swashbuckling, ribald, and irreverent hero Ethan Gage has outsmarted wily enemies and survived dangerous challenges across the globe. Now the rakish hero finds himself in the Caribbean with his wife, Astiza, on a desperate hunt to secure the lost treasure of Montezuma - a legendary hoard rumored to have been hidden from Cortes's plundering Spanish conquistadors. Hot on his heels are British agents who want the gold to finance a black slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, robbing hostile France of its richest colony. The French, too, seek the treasure for the secrets it contains, the key to an incredible new means of invasion that can ensure Britain's defeat - on its own land.

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  Female Short Story The - A...

  Georgia F Stewart, Willa Cather,...

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  A wise man once said ‘The safest place for a child is in the arms of his mother’s voice’.  This is a perfect place to start our anthology of female short stories. 
   
  Some of our earliest memories are of our mothers telling us bedtime stories. This is not to demote the value of fathers but more to promote the often-overshadowed talents of the gentler sex. 
   
  Perhaps ‘gentler’ is a word that we should re-evaluate. In the course of literary history it is men who dominated by opportunity and with their stranglehold on the resources, both financial and technological, who brought their words to a wider audience.  Men often placed women on a pedestal from where their talented words would not threaten their own.   
   
  In these stories we begin with the original disrupter and renegade author Aphra Behn.  A peek at her c.v. shows an astounding capacity and leaves us wondering at just how she did all that. 
   
  In those less modern days to be a woman, even ennobled, was to be seen as second class.  You literally were chattel and had almost no rights in marriage.  As Charlotte Smith famously said your role as wife was little more than ‘legal prostitute’.  From such a despicable place these authors have used their talents and ideas and helped redress that situation.   
   
  Slowly at first.  Privately printed, often anonymously or under the cloak of a male pseudonym their words spread.  Their stories admired and, usually, their role still obscured from rightful acknowledgement. 
   
  Aided by more advanced technology, the 1700’s began to see a steady stream of female writers until by the 1900’s mass market publishing saw short stories by female authors from all the strata of society being avidly read by everyone.  Their names are a rollcall of talent and ‘can do’ spirit and society is richer for their works.   
   
  In literature at least women are now acknowledged as equals, true behind the scenes little has changed but if (and to mis-quote Jane Austen) there is one universal truth, it is that ideas change society.  These women’s most certainly did and will continue to do so as they easily write across genres, from horror and ghost stories to tender tales of love and making your way in society’s often grueling rut.  They will not be silenced, their ideas and passion move emotions, thoughts and perhaps more importantly our ingrained view of what every individual human being is capable of.    
   
  It is because of their desire to speak out, their desire to add their talents to the bias around them that we perhaps live in more enlightened, almost equal, times.   
   
  Within these stories you will also find very occasional examples of historical prejudice.  A few words here and there which in today’s world some may find inappropriate or even offensive.  It is not our intention to make anyone uncomfortable but to show that the world in order to change must reconcile itself to the actual truth rather than put it out of sight.  Context is everything, both to understand and to illuminate the path forward.  The author’s words are set, our reaction to them encourages our change. 
   
  01 - The Female Short Story. A Chronological History - An Introduction - Volume 8 
  02 - When Spirits Steal by Philippa Forest 
  03 - The Strange Looking Man by Fanny Kemble Johnson 
  04 - The Readjustment by Mary Austin 
  05 - Passed by Charlotte Mew 
  06 - The Woman Who Sat Still by Parry Truscott 
  07 - Sylvia by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor.wav 
  08 - The Preacher at Hill Station by Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman 
  09 - The Spirit of the Range by B M Bower 
  10 - The Wooing of Pastor Cummings by Georgia F Stewart 
  11 - Hodge by Elinor Mordaunt 
  12 - Fear by Catherine Wells 
  13 - The Difference by Ellen Glasgow 
  14 - Paul's Case by Willa Cathe

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