Reading Order
Miss Harriet Reading Order
Miss Harriet (1884) by Guy de Maupassant is a collection of stories that showcases Maupassant's art at its most refined — the title story, about an English religious spinster who falls in love with a French painter and drowns herself when she discovers he has kissed the farmer's daughter, is one of the most celebrated of Maupassant's stories and one of the fullest treatments of the combination of religious exaltation and sexual longing that he returns to throughout his work. The collection also includes 'Idylle,' 'Le port,' 'Mes vingt-cinq jours,' and other stories that demonstrate the full range of Maupassant's short story art: the precise observation of the provincial milieu, the sudden revelation of the forces beneath the surface of ordinary life, and the characteristic Maupassant ending in which the irony of the situation is revealed without comment. 'Miss Harriet' is also one of the most sympathetic of Maupassant's treatments of female characters — where many of his stories treat women with a combination of desire and contempt, Miss Harriet is treated with genuine compassion, and her religious longing and her sexual longing are presented as two expressions of the same fundamental need for transcendence that her sterile life has denied her.
Where to start
Miss Harriet (1884) — the collection is short and accessible; the title story is about 40 pages; the whole collection is 200–250 pages. Read alongside the other Maupassant collections (La Maison Tellier, 1881; Les Contes de la Bécasse, 1883; Contes du jour et de la nuit, 1885) to understand the range of Maupassant's short story art in its most productive period.
Complete Miss Harriet Book List
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Miss Harriet
Guy de Maupassant·1884·Short story collection, including the title story 'Miss Harriet' (1883) and a dozen other stories. The title story was one of the most widely translated and anthologized of Maupassant's stories in his own lifetime and remained among the most frequently studied examples of the Naturalist short story in the twentieth century.
Miss Harriet — Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best Maupassant short story collections to read?
Maupassant published sixteen short story collections between 1881 and 1892, and produced approximately 300 stories — making him the most prolific short story writer of the French literary tradition and the writer who more than any other defined the modern short story as a form. The essential collections for first readers are: La Maison Tellier (1881), his first collection and still among the most celebrated, which includes 'La Maison Tellier,' 'Boule de Suif' (actually published separately in Les Soirées de Médan, 1880, but always associated with this period), and 'En famille'; Miss Harriet (1884), which includes the title story and some of his most refined work; Contes du jour et de la nuit (1885), which includes 'La Parure' ('The Necklace'), the most famous and most widely translated of all Maupassant's stories; and L'Inutile Beauté (1890), which includes some of his late, more personally inflected work. Readers who want the complete range of Maupassant's short story art should read the Pléiade edition in two volumes (Contes et nouvelles, edited by Louis Forestier), which is the standard French scholarly text; the Penguin Classics Collected Short Stories (edited by Roger Colet) is the most comprehensive English selection.
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