“People do all sorts of things at picnics” is Howells’s paradoxical foreshadowing of a love match that begins on a picnic on the rocky shore of the Bay of Fundy and then goes wrong. Though the picnickers are convivial, they mask their feelings, at...
Two people regard the same picnic as if from different worlds. The Deacon, a young clergyman, thinks, “My God, how nice it is! People, rocks, the fire, the twilight, a monstrous tree—nothing more, and yet how fine it is. “Laevsky, a man on the verge of a...
Carroll’s picnic in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is mean-spirited. Carroll wanted to transcend Alice and get to issues of religion, society, and politics, narrated by the childish fairies Bruno (about 5) and Sylvie (about 9). “Bruno’s Picnic” and...
Fontane’s take on adultery in Effi Briest is a long, long sad story hinging on a beach-picnic-love affair. At first, it’s a recreational outing for Effi Briest and a friend, Major von Crampas. But soon, the recreation becomes a cover for lust. Though...
Jewett’s “The Reunion” and “The End of the Feast” are episodes describing the Bowden picnic reunion in Dunnet Landing, a fictional town in Maine. The Bowdens sit at long tables in a grove of trees overlooking the sea. It’s a festive...
Winter picnics are few, and among the best is Elizabeth von Arnim’s on a freezing afternoon on a bluff above the Baltic. On a brilliant January day, Elizabeth’s birthday, she travels about three hours in a horse-drawn carriage over deep snow to a bluff...
Norris’s picnic in McTeague is a moment of pleasure in a sad novel. McTeague’s courtship of Trina Sieppe intensifies at the Sieppe family’s Sunday picnic at Schuetzen Park. When Mrs. Sieppe asks him, “Don’t you think picnics are fine fun,...
Stephen Crane’s Whilomville Stories were written in haste and provided ready money. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, written when he was twenty-three years old, lacks the polish of Crane’s future writing. Maggie was self-published and made no money....
Have you ever noticed that when Dorothy says, “There’s no place like home,” she’s eating a picnic lunch? Dorothy has just left Munchkin Country and is on her way to the Emerald City of Oz in the company of the Strawman. Though her meal is a...
Between 1892 and 1902, Owen Wister published stories about a man from Virginia who settled in Wyoming after the Civil War. When these were collected and published as The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains, Wister declared the Old West was dead. The popularity of his...
