“The Story of a Panic” is one of several stories Leonard Wolff complained that were “Pan-ridden.” It was well-known that Pan was code for identifying gay men and women. Woolf’s complaint implies that a Pan story such as “The Story...
Photograph of Leonid Andreyev in the English edition of The Red Laugh (1905). Andreyev’s antiwar story conjures the nightmare of Russia’s war in Manchuria. The novel is constantly morose, and each chapter is a fragment. First of which beginsAndreyev’s antiwar story...
“Miss Grace,” as Grace Margaret Gould was known among fashionistas, advocated for motorcars and picnics but stopped short at women’s suffrage. Writing for Hearst Magazine’s Motor: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to Motoring (1905), Gould puffed the “motor...
“The Curate’s Friend” is one of two of Forster’s coming-out stories published in The Celestial Omnibus. In “The Story of a Panic,” Pan appears in a whirlwind and rapes a young boy. In “The Curate’s Friend,” a Faun...
Grahame’s picnic in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is a wonder. What child (or adult) could ever conceive of a picnic for one eating basket full of “cold chicken. ....
The other picnic in The Wind in the Willows is”Wayfarers All,” a somber conversation between Ratty and Sea Rat that alert readers will guess is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Here Sea Rat portrays the Ancient Mariner, whose...
Picnics in Jack London’s Martin Eden contrast social disparities between the poor working and genteel upper classes. London’s Martin Eden alludes to Horatio Alger Jr.’s heroes who rise in society through hard work and education. But London disparages Alger’s optimism....
Henry Wilcox’s garden party for his daughter’s wedding s reveals Edwardian hypocrisy and predatory sexuality. It’s a turning point in Foster’s Howards End. Forster scants the dinner itself, but when it is about to end, the guests are in stages...
The real secret of The Secret Garden is that with enough picnics and plenty of food, any youth will be happy. Burnett’s The Secret Garden picnics occur in a derelict walled garden where Colin Craven, a fearful, make-believe invalid, and his cousin, Mary Lennox,...
One exception to the unremitting cold in Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a summer church picnic when Ethan and Mattie Silver first feel love for one another. When Mattie is forced to leave, Frome drives her to the train station. Along the way, they stop by the frozen...
