Forty stories showing the extent of women's contribution to the short story form. From Willa Cather's Paul's Case, to a chapter from Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

Introduction -- Paul's case / Willa Cather -- Afterward / Edith Wharton -- Hear the nightingale sing / Caroline Gordon -- Je ne parle pas francais / Katherine Mansfield -- Miss de Mannering of Asham / F.M. Mayor -- That tree / Katherine Anne Porter -- Look at all those roses / Elizabeth Bowen -- In a winter landscape / Olivia Manning -- The legacy / Virginia Woolf -- First love / Eudora Welty -- Is there a life beyond the gravy? / Stevie Smith -- Yonder peasant, who is he? / Mary McCarthy -- Which new era would that be? / Nadine Gordimer -- The day Mr Prescott died / Sylvia Plath -- The day Stalin died / Doris Lessing -- The blush / Elizabeth Taylor -- An interest in life / Grace Paley -- UNO 1945 / Christina Stead -- The rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake / Hortense Calisher -- The tea time of stouthearted ladies / Jean Stafford -- The house of the famous poet / Muriel Spark -- Good country people / Flannery O'Connor -- Heathy landscape with dormouse / Sylvia Townsend Warner -- Irish revel / Edna O'Brien -- The butterfly and the traffic light / Cynthia Ozick -- Scenes of passion and despair / Joyce Carol Oates -- Something to tell the girls / Jane Gardam -- A star and two girls / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala -- Overture and beginners please / Jean Rhys -- Hair Jewellery / Margaret Atwood -- Puss-in-boots / Angela Carter -- The terrors of basket weaving / Patricia Highsmith -- The play reading / Elizabeth Jolley -- In the Great War / Fay Weldon -- Victory over Japan / Ellen Gilchrist -- On the day that E.M. Forster died / A.S. Byatt -- A wife's story / Bharati Mukherjee -- A pair of tickets / Amy Tan -- Meneseteung / Alice Munro -- The prophecy / Anjana Appachana.