‘No artist’, wrote Mary Cholmondeley, ‘must look at one side of life only. We must study it as a whole.’ In her short fiction, Cholmondeley complicates the distinctions between author, narrator and character. Like many New Woman writers of the 1880s and 1890s, Cholmondeley explores the subjectivity of female characters as well as relationships among women of different classes, ages and social backgrounds. Yet, unlike contemporaries such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, George Egerton or Gertrude Dix, Cholmondeley consistently uses narrative irony to reveal the foibles and flaws of her protagonists. This essay will examine narration and female relationships in Cholmondeley's short stories, focusing on how and why women cross – sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully – the shifting boundaries between privilege and deprivation, artist and material, sympathy and desire, respectability and fallenness.

Mary Cholmondeley had a long and varied writing career. For almost forty years, between 1882 and 1921, she published novels, short fiction and a memoir. Cholmondeley's collections include the novella Moth and Rust (1902), The Lowest Rung (1908) and The Romance of His Life (1921). Many of the stories were first published in periodicals such as Cassell's Magazine, Graphic, Harpers Bazaar, Living Age, Monthly Review, Scribners Magazine, Temple Bar and Windsor Magazine. These stories span Cholmondeley's literary career. One of Cholmondeley's earliest published stories, ‘Geoffrey's Wife’, first appeared in 1885 in the Graphic; it was collected later in Moth and Rust. Most of the stories in the 1921 collection The Romance of his Life had never been published previously. And at least three additional stories were published in periodicals and mixed-author collections but never collected with her other short fiction.

In the majority of Cholmondeley's stories, the narrator's observations centre on a female character, and, in many of them, a female narrator relays the action. These female narrators are generally middle aged and conventional, often conscientious and sympathetic, sometimes absent-minded or vindictive.