Short Fiction
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This book offers a raw, unflinching look at the human condition through the eyes of the marginalized, blending social critique with profound empathy and lyrical prose.
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Book Summary
A collection of stark, poetic stories exploring the lives of the poor and oppressed in industrial America. Through vignettes of chain gangs, struggling artists, and lonely widows, Voltairine de Cleyre examines suffering, resilience, and the fleeting moments of beauty that illuminate human existence.
The book opens with a narrator fleeing a sense of universal death into an iron works, where an explosion injures workers. In 'The Chain Gang,' the narrator witnesses black convicts singing while laboring, a raw miracle of creativity amid oppression. 'The Heart of Angiolillo' follows Effie, a Scottish servant trapped in poverty and an unequal relationship, who sacrifices everything for her child. 'The Reward of an Apostate' recounts a narrator's sin of abandoning beauty for energy, resulting in spiritual numbness. In 'At the End of the Alley,' a widow succumbs to alcoholism after her husband's death, revealing the depth of her love and loss. 'To Strive and Fail' portrays a woman haunted by her inability to play the zither, resigning herself to sacrifice. 'The Sorrows of the Body' laments the soul's tyranny over physical desires. 'The Old Shoemaker' depicts a frail man visited by Freedom, undergoing a spiritual transfiguration. 'Where the White Rose Died' observes a drunkard offering roses on a streetcar, refused by all. The collection includes dialogues on anarchism and encounters with nihilists, culminating in 'Between the Living and the Dead,' where three convalescents form a silent kinship, ending in suicide and isolation.
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
- Breaking point
- Aftermath
- Closing
This is the story's dramatic climax because the narrator reaches an emotional and psychological peak of anguis…
Effie
Effie survives at the edge of starvation, married to a feckless man she calls the creeper, who borrows shillings and invites acquaintances to tea he cannot provide. When he proposes pawning the baby's only dress, she refuses — the one line she will not cross — and instead walks the surging London streets with the child, crushing back tears. Her mute endurance draws the notice of a dark Italian visitor whose serious eyes measure her, pulling her unwittingly toward the world of anarchist protest and the tortured prisoners of Montjuich.
Bernard
Bernard is the youth who proposes a communal farm and presses his love on a woman who calls herself too old to learn and mend her mistakes. She tells him plainly that what he loves is her energy, her life, and that when her feet stop springing he will want dancing feet beside him; he retorts that he knows his own mind. Their exchange unfolds against a road where radiant girls and racing young men pass by, sharpening the ache of the years between them and the question of whether devotion can outlast the body's fading.
Bella
Bella remains after the man who measured the window and set the geranium on the sill plunged to the stone below — the kind, hard stone that was merciful. She sits in summer on the step, her seeing blindness fixed on what she cannot understand, sometimes kissed by a skull-like face that loves only the Doll, the one thing that does not shun her. Stranger hands, professional and sterilized, do their kindly duty, but no living breast enfolds her; her soul freezes while her body rots, the sin of the father visited upon the child.
David
David is the youth whose face and soul the older woman confesses she loves, and whose passion she receives with a mixture of gladness and dry foreknowledge. He bends to kiss her feet and is checked — too much like self-abasement, she says — and then told that the time will come when he wishes he had saved that kiss for someone to whom it would all be new. His white, quivering face and buried hands register the wound of being loved for his beauty by a woman who cannot believe she is loved at all.
The Old Shoemaker
The Old Shoemaker sits in his alley over a teacup when the Mighty One comes walking over the sun-beaten bricks, taking no note of the others, entering without asking. He shows no surprise, sets down the cup, and enters into communion with the Stranger, while the infinite dignity of the Unknown covers his wasted limbs and wizened face. Those who witness it understand without words that they have stood at the foot of Tabor and seen a worn soul pass upward smiling, its crust crumbled away — they have been in the presence of Freedom.
Mrs. Bossert
Mrs. Bossert sits sunken in a chair while the narrator watches the gray vacancy move inward toward the last dull red point of fire in her eyes, and hears her shudder with an inhuman whine: 'Alone.' Behind her gathers the midnight specter with royal, malignant eyes — the Monarch of human ruins, the murderous Bridegroom of widowed souls, King Alcohol. The narrator mutters that it is as well that way as another, leaves the money on the table, and goes out into the wild rain where the wind whines the same word through the lashing, leafless trees.
Suffering and Oppression
The book vividly depicts the physical and psychological suffering of marginalized individuals, including convicts in chain gangs, impoverished women, and exploited workers, highlighting systemic cruelty and injustice.
Art and Creativity
The struggle to create and express art is a central theme, seen in the musician who cannot master her instrument, the Chain Gang's spontaneous song, and the yearning to capture fleeting beauty before it is lost.
Isolation and Alienation
Characters experience profound loneliness and disconnection from society, as in the narrator lost in the mist, the dying child with only a doll, and the woman who feels 'alone' in her suffering.
Injustice and Social Critique
The narratives critique social structures like the prison system, poverty, and class inequality, exposing how laws and societal norms perpetuate cruelty and fail the vulnerable.