Short Stories/Novellas

In this near, could-have-happened future tale, teenage Lys finds out that her family has been selected for a reality show. The megabucks are conditional upon the family being interesting enough to catch the interest of fellow Americans. Lys and her drummer brother and overworked elder sister go to great lengths to "be real" . . . In this short, satiric novella, Sherwood Smith has fun with inward and outward expectations: personal, familial, social, and governmental

"Ay, very true, my dear," cried Miss Bates, though Jane had not spoken a word—"I was just going to say the same thing." This single line in EMMA suggested this story, which examines three marriages in Highbury . . .

Anxious, indecisive Barbra is ferocious about one thing: her daughter. When a mysterious music teacher appears at the local school, Barbra and some local parents are up in arms. . . So many things can steal the magic from life. So few things can restore it.

One of three long novella-length stories Sherwood Smith wrote extrapolating from the events of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, “The Dancing Monkeys” features a bitter Henry Crawford wandering the world after his failure at winning Fanny Price. An unexpected encounter with an equally bitter Captain named Wentworth, during a sea battle with the French, brings about changes for both gentlemen . . .

One of the longest-running debates about Jane Austen’s work has been the problematical ending of MANSFIELD PARK. Sherwood Smith feels that part of the problem is that the narrative stops abruptly in Book Three, Chapter XVII. Here the narrator takes the stage to issue a long summary of what happened, after all those brilliant pages of immersing readers in the minds of the characters and their world. When she read James Austen-Leigh’s memoir about his famous aunt in which he reported sister Cassandra begging Jane for a different ending, Smith gained the courage to join the host of other authors who love to play in Jane Austen’s world, and take up the story from that point and offer a new ending.

Hera is angry with Zeus and the rest of the male gods. She takes their powers, and comes to Earth, handing them out to random old women, saying that the weakest have the most wisdom, and further warns them to prove her right! This tongue-in-cheek urban fantasy novelette by Sherwood Smith features old women, including one disabled, whose take on super-powers is different.

“Lily and Crown” , an 18,000 word novella, proves that diplomacy is war by other means as character dance on a graceful reel through power-plays, treachery and clashing cultures, leading to changes for two powerful kingdoms and the birth of a third. This is the origin story of Colend, a setting featured in many of Sherwood Smith’s novels about Sartorias-deles.