A wise man once said 'The safest place for a child is in the arms of his mother's voice'. This is a perfect place to start our anthology of female short stories.

Some of our earliest memories are of our mothers telling us bedtime stories. This is not to demote the value of fathers but more to promote the often-overshadowed talents of the gentler sex.

Perhaps 'gentler' is a word that we should re-evaluate. In the course of literary history it is men who dominated by opportunity and with their stranglehold on the resources, both financial and technological, who brought their words to a wider audience. Men often placed women on a pedestal from where their talented words would not threaten their own.

In these stories we begin with the original disrupter and renegade author Aphra Behn. A peek at her c.v. shows an astounding capacity and leaves us wondering at just how she did all that.

In those less modern days to be a woman, even ennobled, was to be seen as second class. You literally were chattel and had almost no rights in marriage. As Charlotte Smith famously said your role as wife was little more than 'legal prostitute'. From such a despicable place these authors have used their talents and ideas and helped redress that situation.

Slowly at first. Privately printed, often anonymously or under the cloak of a male pseudonym their words spread. Their stories admired and, usually, their role still obscured from rightful acknowledgement.

Aided by more advanced technology, the 1700s began to see a steady stream of female writers until by the 1900's mass market publishing saw short stories by female authors from all the strata of society being avidly read by everyone. Their names are a rollcall of talent and 'can do' spirit and society is richer for their works.

In literature at least women are now acknowledged as equals, true behind the scenes little has changed but if (and to mis-quote Jane Austen) there is one universal truth, it is that ideas change society. These women's most certainly did and will continue to do so as they easily write across genres, from horror and ghost stories to tender tales of love and making your way in society's often grueling rut. They will not be silenced, their ideas and passion move emotions, thoughts and perhaps more importantly our ingrained view of what every individual human being is capable of.

It is because of their desire to speak out, their desire to add their talents to the bias around them that we perhaps live in more enlightened, almost equal, times.

01 - The Female Short Story. A Chronological History - An Introduction - Volume 2

02 - Conversation on Conversation by Harriet Beecher Stowe

03 - Aunt Hetty on Matrimony by Fanny Fern, the writing pseudonym for Sarah Payton Parton

04 - Reality or Delusion by Mrs Ellen Wood

05 - The Little Skeleton by Mary Anne Atherstone writing as M A Bird

06 - Napoleon and the Spectre by Charlotte Bronte

07 - The Knitted Collar by Mary Anne Hoare

08 - The Palace of Death by Emily Bronte

09 - The Lifted Veil - Part 1 by George Eliot

10 - The Lifted Veil - Part 2 by George Eliot

11 - The Peterkins Decide to Learn the Languages by Lucretia Peabody Hale

12 - The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Elizabeth Anna Hart

13 - Two Offers by Frances Watkins Harper

14 - The Last House in C Street by Mrs Craik

15 - A Story of a Wedding Tour by Margaret Oliphant

16 - The Tyburn Ghost by Wilhelmina FitzClarence, The Countess of Munster

17 - The Phantom Coach by Amelia Edwards

18 - The Shipwrecked Crew by Rebecca Harding Davies