Laura by Saki
Quick answer: Laura by Saki: full summary with the ending, the deathbed reincarnation plan, the otter, the Nubian boy, themes of petty sin and the craft of comic escalation.
Laura, informed she is dying, is chiefly interested in the arrangements for afterwards: given her record of small, enjoyable sins, she expects to be reincarnated as some nice animal, an otter perhaps, and she discusses the prospect with her appalled friend Amanda as one might discuss a forwarding address. Laura, from Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), is Saki's brightest comedy of death, a subject he handles here with the gravity of a seating plan.
The story is short, wicked and structurally immaculate: a deathbed conversation, a prophecy, and then the prophecy apparently keeping its schedule, twice. Students meet satire of religious sentiment and the comic uses of ambiguity; writers meet escalation timed like good farce.
The story in brief, ending included
Laura, dying young and entirely unbothered, explains her theology to Amanda: she has been petty and vindictive, but enjoyably so, and such lives are surely not punished harshly; she expects to return as an animal, an otter for preference, elegant, active and well fed on salmon and trout. She admits her recent campaign against Amanda's husband Egbert, whose fussing over his farmyard and his flower garden she found irresistible: her retaliations for his scoldings were small, precise and thoroughly enjoyed, sin answering grievance, cheerfully, to the last week of her life. She dies, as promised, within days. Almost at once, an otter of unusual habits establishes itself on the property: it raids the hen run, destroys Egbert's prize speckled Sussex fowls with what looks like editorial selectivity, choosing the timing that will annoy him most, and eludes ordinary defences with unsporting intelligence. Amanda, remembering the forwarding address, is not amused; she is terrified.
Egbert, blind to metaphysics, calls in the otter hounds. The otter is hunted and killed, and Amanda, who cannot shake the conviction that her friend has just been torn apart on the lawn, falls ill with the strain. To recuperate, the couple travel to Egypt, where the story's second act of providence awaits: their hotel is troubled by a Nubian boy, wild, brown and impossible to catch, who torments Egbert with precisely targeted mischief. The final blow lands offstage: Egbert's raging voice announces the latest outrage, and Laura's dying speculation, that if the otter life ended she might go on to be something else lively and inconvenient, completes its schedule. Amanda relapses. That is the ending: nothing supernatural is ever confirmed, two animals and a child behave as animals and children can, and one woman's nerves keep the theology running without any help from the universe.
The characters
Four parts, one of them possibly played by the same soul throughout.
Themes: sin scaled down, death declawed
The declared theme is a satire of deathbed piety. Every convention of the Victorian dying scene, repentance, solemnity, spiritual stocktaking, is inverted: Laura audits her sins and finds them delightful, plans her afterlife as a lifestyle upgrade, and dies on schedule without a moment of terror. Saki's target is not belief itself but the sentimental machinery around death, and his method is to let the one person actually dying be the only person in the story who is relaxed about it.
The sharper reading concerns evidence and need. Nothing in the story requires the reincarnation to be real: otters raid hen runs, boys torment hotels, coincidence exists. What Saki dramatises is that Amanda needs it to be real, her guilt and grief demand a continuing Laura, and each natural event is promoted into proof. An essay can argue the story is a comedy about how mourning manufactures ghosts, with the punchline that this ghost, if she exists, is having a wonderful time. The ambiguity is load-bearing: confirm the magic and the story becomes whimsy, deny it and it becomes cruelty; suspended, it is perfect.
The craft: prophecy as structure
The design lesson is the self-fulfilling itinerary. Laura's deathbed speech functions as a table of contents: otter first, then, floated lightly, some further lively incarnation. The story then simply executes the schedule, and the reader's delight comes from recognition rather than surprise, the rarer and often stronger twin of the twist. When a character announces the future and the future obliges, every subsequent scene carries double meaning at no extra cost: an otter is an otter and a Laura simultaneously. Writers can lift this wholesale, and those drafting for contest deadlines will find the announced-itinerary structure is also a plotting speedrun, since act two writes itself. It is worth noting that structure and theme marks in Writory's story rubric tend to travel together for exactly this reason.
Observe, too, the management of offstage catastrophe. The otter's death and the boy's final outrage both happen out of view, reported by voices, which keeps the comedy intact; onstage violence would tip the tone. Saki's endings often stop one beat early, and here the relapse of Amanda, rather than any metaphysical verdict, is the final fact. The story ends on a nervous system, not an answer, which is where it lived all along.
Beasts, super-beasts and Saki's animal justice
Laura belongs to the collection whose title announces the program: Beasts and Super-Beasts, where animals repeatedly serve as instruments of correction aimed at smug humans. The otter of this story sits in a gallery with Tobermory's cat and the hyaena of Esmé, creatures who owe nothing to human hierarchies and therefore expose them. What distinguishes Laura is that the beast may be a person, which lets Saki fuse his two favourite jokes, the animal as judge and the incorrigible woman as heroine, into one body. It is his happiest story about death, and possibly his only one where the dead party wins on points.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, name the structure: a deathbed prophecy executed on schedule, with each event readable as coincidence or fulfilment.
- Keep the ambiguity in essays; the story never confirms reincarnation, and Amanda's need for it is the actual subject.
- Use the otter's selective, well-timed raids as the evidence that tempts the reader toward belief.
- Writers: let a character announce the plot in advance; recognition can outperform surprise.
- Keep catastrophes offstage in comedy, reported by voices, to protect the tone.
- Contrast Laura's calm with Amanda's collapse: the satire measures who actually fears death, and it is never the dying.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a dying or departing character cheerfully predicts the specific form their afterlife or return will take, down to habits and menu. Then let events matching the prediction unfold, each with a fully natural explanation, and end on the belief of a survivor rather than a confirmation.
Questions
What happens at the end of Laura by Saki?
After the otter, which Amanda believed was the reincarnated Laura, is killed by hounds, the couple travel to Egypt, where a wild Nubian boy begins tormenting Egbert exactly as Laura might have wished. Amanda, convinced the schedule is continuing, relapses. Nothing is ever confirmed.
Is Laura really reincarnated as the otter?
Saki never says. The otter's hen-run raids are suspiciously well aimed at Egbert, and the timing matches Laura's prediction, but every event has a natural explanation. The ambiguity is deliberate: the story is about Amanda's belief, not the afterlife.
What is the theme of Laura?
A satire of deathbed solemnity and of how grief manufactures evidence. The dying woman treats death as an amusing change of address while the survivors fall apart, reversing every convention of the pious deathbed scene.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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