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Home  »  The Short-Story: Specimens Illustrating Its Development  »  Notes to Mrs. Knollys By Frederic J. Stimson

Brander Matthews (1852–1929). The Short-Story. 1907.

Notes to Mrs. Knollys By Frederic J. Stimson

AUTHOR NOTE

THE AUTHOR of this story is a lawyer of distinction who has written several works of fiction having each of them a flavor of its own. “Mrs. Knollys” was written in 1883.

STORY NOTE

There is at the center of this story a striking idea, at once novel and fascinating. But the mere ingenuity of the closely linked incidents is subordinated to the interest in the chief figure, in the pure pathos of her long waiting and in the final meeting of the young husband who is dead with the elderly wife who is alive. What might have been sensational or even gruesome in less tender hands is here treated with simple dignity and unparaded poetry. To be noted also is the skill with which the glacier itself is ever insisted on; it is with the glacier that the story opens and it is with the glacier that the story closes.