Recommendations
Books Like Miss Harriet
Best books to read after Miss Harriet by Maupassant
Readers who respond to the Miss Harriet collection's refined short story art, its treatment of religious longing and erotic desire, and Maupassant's Normandy landscapes will find the wider tradition of the French short story and the art of the nouvelle.
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La Maison Tellier
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's 1881 collection is the essential companion to Miss Harriet: the two collections together represent the peak of his short story art in the 1880s, and the title story 'La Maison Tellier' is the most celebrated single piece Maupassant wrote before the stories in Miss Harriet.
- 2Buy
Contes du jour et de la nuit
by Guy de Maupassant
The 1885 collection that includes 'La Parure' ('The Necklace'), Maupassant's most famous and most widely translated story: reading Miss Harriet and Contes du jour et de la nuit together shows the full range of Maupassant's short story art in its most productive period.
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Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Bel-Ami (1885) was written in the same period as the Miss Harriet stories and shares their concern with the relationship between masculine desire and female vulnerability: where the stories approach this theme through concentrated episodes, the novel develops it across a full social panorama.
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The Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's 1914 collection is the most important inheritor of Maupassant's short story art in the twentieth century: the same combination of precise social observation, the revelation of what lies beneath the surface of ordinary life, and the characteristic ending that illuminates the situation without explaining it — what Joyce called 'the epiphany' — descends directly from Maupassant.
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The Portable Chekhov
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's short stories are the most important international development of the same form that Maupassant perfected: both writers were producing their masterpieces in the same decade (the 1880s), and the comparison between their stories — Maupassant's ironic closure, Chekhov's open ending — is the best illustration of the range of possibilities in the short story form.
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Une vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Une vie (1883) is the novel that most directly develops the themes of the Miss Harriet stories: the innocence that the social world destroys, the female life reduced by male indifference, and the Normandy landscape as the backdrop for human disappointment are all central to both the stories and the novel.
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Fort comme la mort
by Guy de Maupassant
Fort comme la mort (1889) is the novel most similar in psychological focus to the title story of Miss Harriet: both the story and the novel analyze the relationship between religious or erotic longing and a landscape that mediates it, and both end in the destruction of the person who cannot reconcile the longing with the available world.
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The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
by Katherine Mansfield
Mansfield's stories, which she said were 'written under the influence of Chekhov,' are the closest twentieth-century inheritors of the Miss Harriet tradition: the same precise psychological observation, the same social surfaces concealing emotional depths, and the same short, concentrated form that Maupassant made definitive.
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