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BBC Classics: Ultimate Story Collection
Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Various (Read by), Sam Dale (Read by), Joseph Ayre (Read by), Carolyn Pickles (Read by), Don Gilet (Read by), Clare Corbett (Read by), Ronny Jhutti (Read by), Helen Clapp (Read by), Susan Jameson (Read by), Full Cast (Read by)

BBC Classics: Ultimate Story Collection

90 unmissable tales

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Summary

A treasure chest of timeless short stories by some of the world's greatest authors

Suspense and horror
1 The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire - Arthur Conan Doyle
2 The Signalman - Charles Dickens
3 Lost Hearts - MR James
4 The Sealed Room - Arthur Conan Doyle.
5 Mrs Badgery - Wilkie Collins
6 Wailing Well - MR James
7 The Open Window - Saki
8 How it happened - Arthur Conan Doyle
9 The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
10 The Cone - HG Wells
11 A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf
12 Rats - MR James
13 The Oval Portrait - Edgar Allan Poe
14 Tarquin of Cheapside - F. Scott Fitzgerald
15 One Crowded Hour - Arthur Conan Doyle
16 The Mezzotint - MR James
17 The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe

Love
18 The Kiss - Kate Chopin
19 Eleonora - Edgar Allan Poe
20 About Love - Anton Chekhov
21 The Lovers - Hans Christian Anderson
22 Love - Guy De Maupassant
23 The Sphinx Without a Secret - Oscar Wilde
24 A Wedding Gift - Guy De Maupassant
25 Kew Gardens - Virginia Woolf
26 The District Doctor - Ivan Turgenev
27 Happiness - Guy De Maupassant
28 A Blunder - Anton Chekhov
29 The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky - Stephen Crane
30 In a Far-Off World - Olive Schreiner
31 The Cook's Wedding - Anton Chekhov
32 The Recruit - Honore de Balzac
33 The Nightingale and the Rose - Oscar Wilde
34 Pyramus and Thisbe - Ovid
35 Aunt Hetty on Matrimony - Fanny Fern
36 A Country Cottage - Anton Chekhov
37 Marriage a la Mode - Katherine Mansfield
38 The Statue of Limitations - Ernest Dowson
39 The Dilettante - Edith Wharton

Humorous
40 Tobermory - Saki
41The Mesmeric Mountain - Stephen Crane
42 The Children's Joke - Louisa May Alcott
43 At The Siren - Anton Chekhov
44 The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield
45 The Cask of Amontillado - Edgar Allan Poe
46 The New Dress - Virginia Woolf
47 How I Built Myself A House - Thomas Hardy
48 The Model Millionaire - Oscar Wilde
49 A Pair of Silk Stockings - Kate Chopin
50 At The Barbers - Anton Chekhov
51 A Respectable Woman - Kate Chopin

Folk & Fable
52 The Happy Prince - Oscar Wilde.
53 The Elves and the Shoemaker - The Brothers Grimm
54 The Emperor's New Clothes -Hans Christian Andersen
55 The Tongue Cut Sparrow - Yei Theodora Ozaki
56 Finn and the Scottish Giant - Harold F. Read
57 The Postmaster - Rabindranath Tagore
58 The Toys of Peace - Saki
59 The Selfish Giant - Oscar Wilde
60 The Flower Gatherer - Edward Thomas
61 Araby - James Joyce
62 The Interlopers - Saki
63 Tom Thumb - The Brothers Grimm
64 The Kabuliwalah - Rabindranath Tagore
65 The Monkey's Paws - WW Jacobs

Christmas
66 The Little Match Girl - Hans Christian Andersen
67 Papa Panov's Special Christmas - Leo Tolstoy
68 Christmas Storms and Sunshine - Elizabeth Gaskell.
69 The Gift of the Magi - O'Henry
70 At Christmas Time - Anton Chekhov
71 A Dill Pickle - Katherine Mansfield

Classic Tales
72 The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
73 The Fall of Lord Barrymore - Arthur Conan Doyle
74 The Necklace - Guy De Maupassant
75 Holiday Group - EM Delafield
76 Three Questions - Leo Tolstoy
77 The Cop and the Anthem - O'Henry
78 The Fly - Katherine Mansfield
79 The Christening - DH Lawrence
80 After the Race - James Joyce
81 The String Quartet - Virginia Woolf
82 Two Friends - Guy De Maupassant
83 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce.
84 A Gentleman Friend - Anthon Chekhov
85 Ma'ame Pelagie - Kate Chopin
86 Second Best - DH Lawrence
87 El Verdugo - Honore de Balzac
88 The Story of an Hour - Kate Chopin
89 The Man of No Account - Bret Hart
90 The Piece of String - Guy De Maupassant
©2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

About the authors

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement.

Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.

Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
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Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh where he qualified as a doctor, but it was his writing which brought him fame, with the creation of Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective. He was also a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.
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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
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