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A later and generally shorter kind of story, which has little or no action, no plot in the old sense of the term, but depends instead on insight into character, the ability to suggest a mood or atmosphere, can be found in the work of Katherine Mansfield. She did not invent it, for stories of this kind were being written in the 1890's, but she gave it emotional intensity and poetic feeling. She and her contemporaries, all writing about the time of World War I, was very much under the influence of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian master of the short story, whose work was first appearing at that time in the English translations.

A friend and contemporary of Katherine Mansfield was D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), many of whose short stories are more satisfying than all but two or three of his novels. Lawrence is able to combine something of the ...