Short Fiction
Free public-domain edition — preview in your browser, no account required for the first chapter.
Preview free · sign up to save progress, download to your shelf, and sync with the apps
Already have an account? Sign in
Read Saki for his unparalleled ability to skewer Edwardian society with savage humor and unexpected darkness, offering timeless critiques of hypocrisy and social pretension that remain startlingly relevant.
Edition details
Book Summary
Saki's short fiction skewers Edwardian society with razor-sharp wit, exposing the hypocrisy, cruelty, and absurdity lurking beneath polite conventions. Through mischievous protagonists like Reginald and Clovis, and darkly ironic tales of animals and humans, the stories celebrate rebellion and individuality while mocking social pretensions.
This collection of Saki's short stories ranges from the satirical to the macabre, often featuring rebellious young men like Reginald and Clovis who disrupt polite society with irreverent wit. In 'The Image of the Lost Soul,' a bird finds solace in a stone carving before dying in captivity, while 'Dogged' follows a timid man corrupted by a rakish terrier. 'The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water' escalates a trivial quarrel into absurd violence, and 'The Saint and the Goblin' mocks religious misunderstanding. Several Reginald stories lampoon Christmas gifts, art exhibitions, and choir outings. 'Louise' and 'The East Wing' highlight absentmindedness and social paralysis during a fire. 'Tea' subverts marriage proposals, while 'Forewarned' and 'For the Duration of the War' explore deception and literary fraud. Throughout, Saki exposes the gap between public morality and private selfishness, often with a darkly comic twist that underscores the futility of ambition and the cruelty inherent in social hierarchies.
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.
Clovis Sangrail
Clovis moves through county society as a guest whose amusement is other people's discomfort, matching wits with a baroness over whose role will dominate a Greek play. When she annexes his verse for her own glorification, he turns gentle and assiduous in coaching the nervous Cassandra instead. His retaliation matters because it converts private theatrical rivalry into public scandal, exposing the social fault lines the county would rather keep curtained.
Reginald
Reginald is the guest every hostess fears and every reader follows, drifting from marrons glacés to croquet lawn in search of conversational prey. He punctures Colonel Mendoza's age, instructs the youngest Rampage in absinthe before his temperance-minded mother, and discusses Zaza with the Archdeacon's wife until she orders her carriage. His cousin's desperate diplomatic maneuvers matter because they show how one ungovernable wit can dissolve an entire afternoon's social order.
Bertie van Tahn
Bertie resents the festive season and the eager social planning around him, contributing only a scandalous remark about bed-space and a refusal to join the others. Left in charge while the household troops out to hear the animals talk, he becomes the still point in a story of mild heathen frolic. His scornful detachment matters because it isolates him at the exact moment the household's carefully chaperoned expedition begins.
Groby Lington
Groby Lington was long regarded as a cheerful, well-dispositioned body who gave no particular trouble, but recent months have turned his household and congregation against him. He flips lozenges at a fellow worshipper during prayer and swings a servant into a clump of nettles with unsettling glee. His transformation matters because the story's early arc is the widening gap between his former reputation and the inexplicable conduct everyone is now cataloguing.
Martin Stoner
Stoner arrives at the farm soaked and starving, and the old servant greets him as Master Tom, dead four years to the family. He eats, accepts a bed, and wakes to the cold realization that he has been handed another man's inheritance and another man's estrangement. His dilemma matters because the story's tension is whether he can slip away before the fraud thrust upon him is discovered.
Kenelm Jerton
Jerton is the man at the center of a luggage mix-up, overhearing a furious lady demand why her dress-basket and dressing-case have been tampered with. He recognizes the name Kestrel-Smith, hears enough, and vanishes into the Turkish bath rather than face the consequences. His panic matters because it establishes him as a man whose small evasions keep compounding into larger predicaments.
Social Class and Status
The book repeatedly examines the hierarchies of society, from the faded gentry clinging to past importance to the nouveau riche and the struggles of the poor, often highlighting the absurdity and cruelty of class distinctions.
Hypocrisy and Moral Facade
Characters frequently present a pious or respectable exterior while engaging in selfish, petty, or immoral behavior, exposing the gap between public virtue and private vice.
Rebellion and Individuality
Many stories feature characters who defy authority, convention, or oppressive guardians, often through wit, imagination, or subversive acts, celebrating the spirit of nonconformity.
The Absurdity of Social Rituals
The narratives mock the empty conventions of Edwardian society, such as tedious house parties, meaningless games, and rigid etiquette, revealing their inherent silliness and lack of genuine purpose.
Reading tools
BetterReads is more than a book page—e-reader, AI beside the text, audiobooks, and native apps in one system.