Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Like the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have originated-or at least received its present stamp-in France. English writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the French and Russians first carried the art.
Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling, past-master of the conte, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose delightful early volumes, "Noughts and Crosses" and "I Saw Three Ships," are less known than they deserve to be. These writers had long been preceded by Scott in "Wandering Willy's Tale" and other short stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne; but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition.