The Wife's Story

"The Wife's Story"
Short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
Country	United States
Language	English
Publication
Published in	The Compass Rose
Publication type	Collection
Publisher	Pendragon Press
Media type	Hardback
Publication date	1982
Chronology
Jake   Julian

"The Wife's Story" is a short story written by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Plot summary

Written in a vernacular first-person narrative, the title character (who is eventually revealed to be a wolf) describes her beloved spouse and their idyllic family life in the past tense, except during the new moon, when he mysteriously disappeared. She then relates the night she witnessed his metamorphosis into a human and screamed in horror, resulting in her family and neighbors chasing and killing him.

Interpretation

The story is unusual for its point-of-view: Of the many books and stories on werewolves, few are written from the perspective of wolves. Le Guin goes to great lengths to conceal the nature of the narrator, fully exploiting the reader's assumptions to purposefully heighten the plot twist at the story's denouement.

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Cadden, Mike (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-99527-2.
• Bourgault du Coudray, Chantal (2006). The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within (1st ed.). New York, NY: I. B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1845111571.
• Freedman, Carl (2008). Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin (Literary Conversations Series) (1st ed.). University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1604730937.
• Gelfante, Blanche H. (2004). The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (1st ed.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231110990.

External links

• "Changing Lives Through Literature" entry about the story