ABSTRACT
Mary Eagleton was among the first critics to explore the connections between gender and the short story in a theoretical way, moving beyond specific case studies. In the 1990s, Susan Hill, Josephine Donovan and Elaine Showalter continued to address the issue cautiously, trying to avoid the traps of essentialism while focusing on the "angles of vision and ways of expression" that might differentiate between men's and women's novellas and short fictions. In her postscript to British Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now, Clare Hanson rightly comments: "There have been few critical studies of the British short story and none which has focused on the interaction between gender and genre". It is commonly acknowledged that Poe's poetic comments in the 1830s led to the birth of the modern short story as a unique genre and laid the foundations of subsequent short story theories.
