Short Stories About Love: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about love, from The Gift of the Magi to The Lady with the Dog, summarised and compared, with the craft moves a writer can borrow.
People reach for love stories at the two moments a life bends: when they are in love and want company, and when it has gone wrong and they want a witness. The short story serves both moods because it can hold a single evening and stop before the consequences soften.
The collection runs from the declared and sacrificial (O. Henry, Wilde) through the undeclared (Chekhov, Chopin) to love that returns through a song or a letter (Joyce, Dostoevsky). Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. A young couple on twenty dollars a week each sell their one treasure to buy the other a Christmas present, and the two gifts cancel out. The story opens with Della counting one dollar and eighty-seven cents, sixty cents of it in pennies.
The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov. Gurov, a bored Moscow husband, begins a holiday affair with Anna Sergeyevna at Yalta and expects to forget her. Back home he tries to tell a card partner about her and gets a remark about the sturgeon being off; that sends him to her town.
About Love by Anton Chekhov. Alyohin tells two guests about the years he loved Anna Alexeyevna, his friend's wife, and never spoke. The one embrace happens in a railway compartment as she leaves for good.
The Storm by Kate Chopin. During a Louisiana downpour Calixta and her old admirer Alcee spend an hour together while her husband and son wait it out at the store. Chopin punishes nobody; Bobinot brings home shrimps and the family eats supper laughing.
Araby by James Joyce. A Dublin boy promises to bring Mangan's sister a gift from the bazaar and arrives as the stalls are shutting. Standing in the dark hall with coins in his pocket, he sees his devotion as vanity.
The Dead by James Joyce. After a Twelfth Night party Gabriel Conroy watches his wife Gretta on the stairs, listening to a tenor sing an old ballad. In the hotel she tells him about Michael Furey, a boy who died for her, and Gabriel learns how small a place he holds in her past.
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A lonely Petersburg dreamer meets Nastenka on a canal bridge and, over four nights, helps her wait for the lodger who promised to return. The ending turns on a letter that arrives the next morning.
The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde. A nightingale presses her breast against a thorn all night to dye a rose red for a student who needs one for a girl. The girl prefers jewels, and the rose ends under a cart wheel.
The Darling by Anton Chekhov. Olenka loves whoever is nearest, a theatre manager, a timber merchant, a vet, and borrows each man's opinions whole. Chekhov shows her repeating Kukin's complaints about the public word for word; her last love is a schoolboy who does not want it.
A Service of Love by O. Henry. Joe and Delia, married art students in New York, each pretend to have found genteel work so the other can keep studying. A bandaged hand gives the game away.
Reading them together
Side by side, the stories argue that love is revealed by what it costs, not by what it says. O. Henry makes the cost cheerful; Wilde makes it fatal and unnoticed; Chekhov makes it a lifetime of silence in About Love and of borrowed opinions in The Darling. The two Joyce stories bracket the rest: Araby is love before it has a worthy object, The Dead is love discovering that its object had a whole life elsewhere.
Few of these stories end with a couple in a room together. The Storm is the exception, and its calm domestic close is more startling than any parting.
If you want to write about love
What writers can take from this
- Read Araby and The Dead in that order; they are the first and last stories of Dubliners and describe the same longing at fifteen and at forty-five.
- Pair The Gift of the Magi with A Service of Love to see O. Henry run the same engine twice with different gears.
- In the Chekhov stories, watch what the characters do with their hands while they avoid saying the important thing.
- Read The Storm for how weather can carry a plot without becoming a symbol anyone needs to explain.
- White Nights is longer than the others; give it one sitting so the four nights keep their rhythm.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which two people who love each other each give up something the other one needed them to keep, and neither ever says so aloud.
Questions
What is the best short story about love?
For sheer influence, The Gift of the Magi. For depth, most readers and teachers name The Lady with the Dog or The Dead, which treat love as something that keeps changing after the story would normally end.
Which short stories about love are good for students?
The Gift of the Magi, Araby and The Nightingale and the Rose are short, widely taught and rich in irony and symbol. About Love works well for older students because it frames one story inside another.
Which classic love story is the shortest?
The Nightingale and the Rose and The Gift of the Magi each run about two thousand words. The Storm is not much longer and can be read in ten minutes.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.