'Critics have successfully highlighted the contributions of New Women writers to the Decadent and Aestheticist movements, but this article redresses the marginalization of fin-de-siècle short stories by women writers such as Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, and Ella D'Arcy in histories and theories of the short story. By tracing the formal characteristics and innovations in women's short fiction of the 1890s, it discusses the literary value of women's stories in their own right as well as argues for their seminal importance in the development of the modern short story in Britain. ' (Publication abstract)