Two by Two
The nearest companion — four long stories on marriage, and gathered into the same omnibus.
Read our take
Pretty Tales for Tired People
Three long stories about clever people who cannot see the thing standing in front of them. The title is a joke, and this was her last collection.
- 1965
- 221
About Martha Gellhorn
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeGellhorn's 1965 collection gathers three long stories about people whose intelligence fails to protect them from what they want. The title is a joke at the reader's expense: these are not pretty tales, and the tiredness is the sort that comes from watching capable adults ruin themselves in slow motion. It is the last of her three story collections and the most astringent.
The story, in more detail
Three long stories: A Promising Career, The Clever One, and The Fall and Rise of Mrs Hapgood. Marriage and sexual politics are the subject of all three, handled with less patience than in Two by Two seven years earlier.
Gellhorn was fifty-six, between The Face of War and the Vietnam reporting. The register is the one she used for people she had decided not to protect: characters who are clever in company and cannot see the thing standing in front of them. She never said in so many words that the title was ironic, and the stories make it difficult to read any other way. All three were collected into The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn in 1991, which is how most readers now reach them.
Themes and analysis
A future imagined over tea
Terry Potter's review reads Claud Roylands's downfall in A Promising Career as an exposure of the community that once admired him. The interest is not simply that desire destroys a successful man's prospects. Potter emphasizes the contrast between his acquaintances' professed concern and their enjoyment of his humiliation, conveyed through dialogue rather than direct explanation. On this reading, social respectability is less a reliable judgment of character than a fragile agreement among spectators. The headmaster's loss of standing reveals how little protection their approval ever offered.
The end of being obliging
Potter describes Mrs Hapgood's response to marital abandonment as a rejection of her accustomed niceness. Read beside his account of Roylands, her reinvention reverses the assumption that losing an established place must mean losing a future. The habit of pleasing others becomes something she can reconsider rather than a fixed definition of herself. This contrast helps explain the collection's interest in sexual politics: social roles organize what its characters expect from intimacy, but those expectations can collapse into either humiliation or an opportunity to behave differently.
Why we recommend it
Her sharpest fiction
The war reporting is where the compassion lives. The stories are where the eye is coldest, and this collection is the coldest of the three.
Written at the height of the career
1965, between The Face of War and the Vietnam reporting, by a writer with nothing left to prove.
Three, not a dozen
Long stories with room to move, closer to short novels than to anything you would call a sketch.
What this book explores
Timeline
1965
Simon & Schuster publishes the three long stories, with a UK edition from Michael Joseph the same year — Gellhorn fifty-six, between The Face of War and the Vietnam reporting.
1991
All three are gathered into The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn, from Sinclair-Stevenson.
1994
The omnibus reaches America as The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn, from Vintage — how most readers now find the stories.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Simon & Schuster
- 1965
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Michael Joseph
- 1965
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Sinclair-Stevenson
- 1991
- Paperback
- Vintage
- 1994
- 9780679743699
Reader reviews
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Pretty Tales for Tired People: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Pretty Tales for Tired People?
Martha Gellhorn. The collection was published in 1965.
What is Pretty Tales for Tired People?
Three long stories — A Promising Career, The Clever One, and The Fall and Rise of Mrs Hapgood — about people whose intelligence fails to protect them from what they want.
Is the title sincere?
No — it is a joke at the reader's expense. These are not pretty tales, and the tiredness is the kind that comes from watching capable adults ruin their lives.
What are its subjects?
Marriage and sexual politics, among people who ought to know better.
What kind of book is it?
A collection of three long stories — the novella length Gellhorn favored throughout her fiction.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Pretty Tales for Tired People, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1Martha Gellhorn: A Life
BiographyCaroline Moorehead, 2003Used forUsed to verify Pretty Tales for Tired People's bibliographic context and its place within Martha Gellhorn's published work.
2Martha Gellhorn — War Correspondent and Writer | Blue Plaques
WebsiteEnglish HeritageUsed forUsed for independent archival, institutional, or historical context surrounding Martha Gellhorn and Pretty Tales for Tired People.
3Ernest Hemingway Collection — Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway) | EH@JFK, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
WebsiteJohn F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumUsed forUsed to cross-check chronology, publication history, and the circumstances in which Pretty Tales for Tired People appeared.
4Martha Gellhorn | Historic Missourians
WebsiteThe State Historical Society of MissouriUsed forUsed for an additional scholarly or biographical perspective on Pretty Tales for Tired People and Martha Gellhorn's wider career.
5Pretty Tales For Tired People by Martha Gellhorn — review
WebsiteThe LetterPress Project, 2018Used forWork-specific critical review, explicitly attributed in the added analysis; not a primary-text or edition collation.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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