Short Fiction
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This collection offers a masterful, psychologically penetrating look at the darker side of love and human connection, perfect for readers who appreciate literary fiction that disturbs and provokes.
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Book Summary
Daphne du Maurier's short fiction collection explores the dark undercurrents of human relationships, from childhood terror to adult disillusionment. Through tales of possessive love, failed marriages, and self-deception, the stories reveal how fear, frustration, and memory shape our lives, often leading to disappointment and isolation.
The collection opens with 'Terror,' where a child's fear of shadows in her dark room is dismissed by her nanny, leaving her alone in terror. 'A Difference in Temperament' depicts a couple's argument over independence versus togetherness, ending in rejection and resentment. In 'A Man of Straw,' a failed man recounts his life of self-pity and ruined relationships, including a forced abortion. 'The Lover' exposes a man's manipulative romantic entanglements and fear of intimacy. 'The Supreme Artist' shows an actor clinging to a romanticized memory of a past affair while the woman has moved on to a contented marriage. 'Frustration' follows a disastrous honeymoon where a couple's camping trip collapses, leading to poverty and a loveless marriage. 'Indiscretion' reflects on how a careless remark about a vulnerable girl destroys a man's career and his boss's marriage. Throughout, characters grapple with suffocating love, gender power imbalances, class struggles, and the haunting gap between memory and reality.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Short Fiction
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
- Closing
This is the dramatic climax because the protagonist reaches an emotional and psychological peak of desperation…
Full beat labels and climax notes unlock in the reader.
Follow the arc while readingTheme heatmap
Narrator (First Person)
He drifts through lunches and taxis narrating his own life as though scripting a play, imagining his lover planting violets on his grave one moment and buying an azalea as 'the symbol of my love' the next. His vanity and sentimentality are inseparable from his genuine ache, and he cannot tell whether he is suffering or performing. That blur between self-pity and real feeling is what makes his stories so unnerving to follow.
Narrator (Second Person)
This narrator addresses you as a companion in the story, whether recalling a girl weeping under rain outside the Empire or pressing you to admit what you would have done. The intimacy is disarming, and it makes you complicit in the desires and failures being described. Du Maurier uses this voice to collapse the distance between reader and character, so that the ache lands as your own.
The Woman
She surfaces in Wardour Street on a rainy night, a girl whose one word — 'romance' — lodges in the narrator's mind for months and refuses to leave. She is glimpsed rather than known, her hat low, her face turned away, and that elusiveness is exactly what gives her power over him. Her presence turns an ordinary man's dull life into something he must confess aloud, even at a wedding.
Nurse
She sits pretending to do sums while he rocks on his heels and says the things he knows will cut her, and she wonders, calmly, why she loves him at all. Her armour is a sheet of coldness, but a tear still falls on the blotting-paper, and she gives him one more chance in a voice deliberately stripped of feeling. Her disciplined suffering against his casual cruelty is the emotional engine of the story's central quarrel.
Bridget
Bridget wakes to a noise she cannot reason about, and the bedroom she knows by day has rearranged itself into something sinister: a cold white arm with no body, a wardrobe taller than the ceiling. She lies frozen, certain that any movement will bring the silent figures toward her bed, and the terror is rendered with a child's terrible precision. Her helpless watchfulness is the whole story's nerve, making the ordinary dark of a nursery into a place where anything might step out.
Blonde Heroine
A stereotypical blonde heroine appearing in a story-within-a-story or parody.
Fear and Terror
The book opens with a child's terrifying night, where ordinary objects transform into monstrous shapes, exploring primal fear and the vulnerability of childhood.
Love and Possession
Many stories examine the tension between intimacy and individual freedom, showing how love can become suffocating when one partner demands total emotional and physical sharing.
Frustration and Disillusionment
Characters frequently experience thwarted desires, failed relationships, and a sense of life's meaninglessness, often stemming from post-war disillusionment and personal weakness.
Self-Deception and Role-Playing
Characters construct romantic fantasies or false personas to escape reality, as seen in the man who invents a tragic past and the artist who manipulates his lover's emotions.