Collections of note

From the litany of successful women writers of the 20th century who embraced the short-story form, two stand out. They are the redoubtable  English writer, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and the passionate American writer, Flannery O’Connor (1924-1964). Highly influential, Woolf’s most exhaustive compilation of “sketches” as she described them – is The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). This collection which includes two previous volumes – A Haunted House and Mrs. Dalloway's Party – provides a rich selection of her shorter writings from between 1917 and 1944.  Equally noteworthy, The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1917) comprises two earlier collections,  A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. This anthology  of some 30 tales, won the 1972 US National Book Award for Fiction. Both of these writers’ collective works were published posthumously.