Short Stories About Loneliness: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about loneliness, from Miss Brill and Misery to Bartleby and The Overcoat, summarised with the craft each one teaches about writing solitude.
Loneliness is the short story's home subject. The form is built for a single consciousness in a small space, and the writers here found that the loneliest people are rarely alone: they are surrounded by fares, colleagues, employers and Sunday crowds who do not hear them.
The collection starts with the quiet public kind (Mansfield, Chekhov), moves through the institutional kind (Melville, Gogol), and ends with the domestic kind, two sisters in a flat and an old servant with a parrot. Every title opens a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield. An English teacher in a French town spends Sunday in the public gardens imagining herself part of a performance, until a young couple on her bench mock her fur. At home she puts the fur back in its box and thinks she hears something crying.
Misery by Anton Chekhov. Iona, a sledge-driver whose son died that week, tries to tell each fare about it and is cut off every time. The story ends in the stable, where he finally tells the whole thing to his horse.
The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore. A Calcutta clerk posted to a village teaches the orphan girl Ratan her letters, then falls ill and resigns. When she asks whether he will take her home, he laughs, and the boat leaves without her.
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. A Wall Street lawyer hires a copyist who begins declining tasks with the same mild sentence and ends by living in the office. The lawyer's helplessness in the face of a man who wants nothing is the real subject.
The Furnished Room by O. Henry. A young man drifts through lower Manhattan rooming houses looking for a singer who vanished, and rents a room where a smell of mignonette convinces him she has been. The final scene belongs to two landladies over a beer.
The Man in a Case by Anton Chekhov. Belikov, a Greek teacher who wears galoshes in fine weather and fears everything, nearly marries a laughing woman named Varenka. A fall down a staircase and her laughter finish him.
Vanka by Anton Chekhov. A nine-year-old shoemaker's apprentice writes to his grandfather on Christmas Eve begging to be taken home, and addresses the envelope simply to grandfather, in the village. He sleeps happy.
A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert. Felicite serves one family in a Normandy town for fifty years and loses everyone she loves in turn: a sweetheart, a nephew, the child she raised. Her last attachment is a parrot, which she has stuffed and hangs on the wall.
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. Akaky Akakievich, a copying clerk in Petersburg, saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on a dark square the night he wears it to a party. Gogol gives him a ghostly afterlife, but the loneliness is in the office scenes before.
The Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield. Josephine and Constantia, middle-aged and suddenly fatherless, cannot decide whether to give away his watch or dismiss the maid. They are afraid to open his wardrobe in case he is inside it.
Reading them together
The collection makes one argument twice. The first version, in Misery, Miss Brill and The Postmaster, is that loneliness is a failed transaction: something offered that nobody takes. The second version, in Bartleby and The Man in a Case, is that a lonely person can become unreadable to others, and that unreadability frightens them. Vanka and A Simple Heart stand apart because their protagonists do not feel lonely at all; the reader carries the feeling for them.
Contrast Iona's horse with Felicite's parrot. Both stories end with an animal receiving what no person would, and in both cases the writer refuses to mock the substitution.
If you want to write about loneliness
What writers can take from this
- Start with Misery; it is under three thousand words and contains the whole shape of the theme.
- Read Miss Brill and The Daughters of the Late Colonel together to watch Mansfield handle loneliness in one head and then in two.
- Bartleby and The Overcoat are both office stories; compare how each treats the copying of documents as a picture of a life.
- Notice in The Postmaster how Tagore shifts the last paragraph to the child left behind.
- A Simple Heart is the longest here; read it slowly, since its effect depends on accumulation.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character tries to tell three different people the same piece of news and is interrupted each time, and then tells it to something that cannot answer.
Questions
What is the best short story about loneliness?
Misery by Chekhov is the most often cited, because it does everything the theme demands in a few pages. Miss Brill and Bartleby, the Scrivener are the usual companions in anthologies.
Which short stories about loneliness are good for students?
Miss Brill, Misery, Vanka and The Postmaster are short, clear and full of discussable choices, especially their endings. Bartleby suits older students who can handle a longer, stranger narrator.
Which classic story about loneliness is the shortest?
Vanka is the shortest, at around fifteen hundred words. Misery and Miss Brill are each under three thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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