Some silly, romantic fripperies to leaven out some searingly intense social criticism. Full review at my blog. ( )

A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. She, for one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which she had been a victim: the pretence that a man and a woman, forced into the narrowest of personal relations, must remain there till the end, though they may have outgrown the span of each other's natures as the mature tree outgrows the iron brace about the sapling.

A short story collection from 1904.

The majority of the stories were about marriage and other relationships between men and women, but there were a couple about the trials of being a published author and a couple of historical stories. In general I preferred the stories in the second half of the book. My favourite was The Quicksand in which a widow tells a younger woman her feelings about her own marriage and why she doesn't want the same fate to befall her, followed by The Reckoning, whose protagonist discovers that what's sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, much to her regret.

The Lady's Maid's Bell was shaping up to be an atmospheric if not frightening ghost story about a ladys' maid her mistress and her mistress's late lady's maid, but then just fizzled out and stopped. I'm hoping that the stories in her 1910 collection Tales of Men and Ghosts will be better. I was less keen on The Descent of Man, The Other Two and The Dilettante, and A Venetian Night's Entertainment would have been better if the twist at the end had come as a surprise (unfortunately I cottoned on to what was happening straightaway). ( )