Short Stories About Pride: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about pride, from The Necklace and The Emperor's New Clothes to Mr Know-All and The Cask of Amontillado, summarised and compared.
Pride is the flaw readers most enjoy watching because they recognise it and are sure they do not have it. The stories here catch it in every register, from a peasant defending his honour over a piece of string to a prince walking a procession in nothing at all.
The collection begins with vanity exposed in public, moves to pride that costs a marriage or a life, and ends with the one story where a proud man swallows his pride for someone else. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. Mathilde Loisel, born for luxury and married to a clerk, refuses to attend a ball without jewels and borrows a diamond necklace from a rich schoolfriend. She has one perfect evening. The ending turns on a sentence spoken ten years later.
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. Two weavers promise an emperor cloth invisible to anyone unfit for their post, and every courtier, seeing nothing, praises it. A child in the crowd says what everyone can see.
The Remarkable Rocket by Oscar Wilde. A firework so convinced of his own importance that he weeps at his own sensitivity gets damp and fails to go off at the royal wedding. He is thrown in a ditch and finally explodes when nobody is looking.
Fat and Thin by Anton Chekhov. Two old schoolfriends meet on a railway platform and embrace, until the thin one learns the fat one's rank. His whole body seems to shrink, along with his wife and son.
The Luncheon by W. Somerset Maugham. A young writer with eighty francs to last the month is asked to lunch at an expensive Paris restaurant by an admirer who insists she never eats more than one thing. She orders salmon, caviar, champagne, asparagus and peaches, one thing at a time.
Mr Know-All by W. Somerset Maugham. Max Kelada, the most disliked man on a ship to Yokohama, bets a hundred dollars that Mrs Ramsay's pearls are real, then looks at her face. He pays up.
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe. Montresor, who has borne a thousand injuries from Fortunato, lures him during carnival into the family catacombs with the promise of a rare wine. He carries a trowel under his cloak.
The Birth-mark by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Aylmer, a scientist, cannot bear the small hand-shaped mark on his wife's cheek and persuades her to let him remove it. Georgiana drinks what he gives her.
Mrs Packletide's Tiger by Saki. Mrs Packletide wants to shoot a tiger purely to outdo a rival hostess, and arranges an elderly one and a tethered goat. The goat dies, the tiger dies of something else, and her paid companion sees everything.
A Piece of String by Guy de Maupassant. Maitre Hauchecorne bends to pick up a piece of string in the Goderville market square and is seen by an enemy, who accuses him of pocketing a lost wallet. The wallet is returned, and nobody believes him anyway.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that pride is a story a person tells about themselves, and fiction punishes it by finding a witness. Andersen's child, Saki's Miss Mebbin, Poe's Fortunato in his niche: each is the audience the proud never counted on. Maupassant's two stories are the poles: Mathilde's pride costs her ten years and Hauchecorne's costs him his mind, and neither ever learns the lesson the reader does.
Mr Know-All is the outlier, and the reason the collection ends there. Kelada is vain in every scene until the one that matters, and Maugham lets his vanity be the disguise for his decency.
If you want to write about pride
What writers can take from this
- Read Fat and Thin first; at under a thousand words it is the purest specimen here.
- Pair The Luncheon with The Necklace: both are about a Paris evening someone cannot afford.
- The Cask of Amontillado is usually filed under revenge; read it once as a study of wounded vanity.
- Mr Know-All rewards a second reading once you know why Kelada pays.
- Andersen and Wilde make a good pair for younger readers, since both fables are also jokes.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a proud character stages an event to impress one specific rival, and the only person who understands what actually happened is someone they were paying not to notice.
Questions
What is the best short story about pride?
The Necklace is the standard choice, with The Emperor's New Clothes as the fable version. Mr Know-All is the one that turns pride inside out.
Which short stories about pride are good for students?
Fat and Thin, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Luncheon and Mrs Packletide's Tiger are short and funny and make the flaw easy to discuss. The Necklace is the essay staple.
Which classic story about pride is the shortest?
Fat and Thin, at well under a thousand words. The Emperor's New Clothes is about the same length.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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