Nineteenth-century French short stories were devoured by their readers
with an insatiable appetite. A reading public that was itself expanding
rapidly, as education and leisure opportunities grew, created an
unprecedented demand for short fiction. Writers quickly responded to
this; it was a lucrative market, and at the same time it offered the
intrinsic artistic challenge of brevity. From Romanticism to Naturalism
and beyond, novelists such as Balzac and Zola explored the potential of
the short story as an alternative form to the novel in depicting modern
life. The...