This book rescues from oblivion the seven known short stories of Harley Granville Barker and demonstrates the sometimes very close relationship between individual stories and one or another of Barker's plays written about the same time. Quite apart, however, from these considerations of the connections between his works in prose fiction and his dramatic pieces, the book seeks to examine the merits of the stories in their own right and to compare them with the work of other short-story writers of the same period, including Galsworthy, Lawrence, and Munro. Though his output in this genre was small, Barker is not dwarfed in this scintillating company. Eric Salmon is a theater historian and writer.