Abracadabra & other satires — A Reader’s Guide

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In Category - Utopias Future Societies Other Worlds

Authors: Galsworthy, John, 1867-1933 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2025 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Short stories, English; English fiction -- 20th century Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 69,215

Reading time 301 min

Text sections 14

Abracadabra & other satires — A Reader’s Guide can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 69,215 words, 5 hr 1 min estimated reading time, and 14 detected text sections.

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #75431

In this collection of satires, Galsworthy uses recurring images of physical hiding, competitive anxiety, and abrupt scene shifts to expose social pretensions, as seen in the bathroom-hiding Minna and the judge's relentless comparison with rivals.

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he was to us but a symbol of shyness for months before she became a body--a very thin body, with dark, straggly hair, and dark eyes, and very long legs and arms for an eight-year-old. Looking back on her hardihoods from eight to fifteen, I find difficulty in assigning to the bathroom period its full significance, to realise that she actually used to make herself invisible because she could not face strange people even of her own age. She faced us so beautifully afterward, would steal up behind and pull our hairs, and bag our caps and throw them up on to the tops of wardrobes, and then, as likely as not, climb up, throw them down, and follow with a jump. Few were the tops of our trees that did not know her in her blue jersey and red cap, and stockings green at the knees and showing little white portions of her. She had a neck long as a turkey’s and feet narrow as canoes. She was certainly going to be tall. Though quite normal about sticking pins into a body, making the lives of calves and dogs burdensome, giving fizzy magnesia to cats, fetching stray souls down with a booby-trap, and other salutary pastimes, she would dissolve into tears and rush away if anybody played Chopin, or caught and killed a butterfly; and, if one merely shot a little bird with a catapult, would dash up and thump him. When she fought she was like a tiger-cat, but afterward would sit and shake uncontrollably with most dreadful dry sobs. So there was no relying on her.

She could not have been called pretty in those days.

She became fifteen and went to school. We saw little of her for three years. At eighteen she came home, and out. Then we would meet her at dances, and picnics, skating and playing tennis--always languid, pale, dark-eyed; still not quite regular in her features, and with angles not perfectly covered; but, on the whole, like a tall lily with a dark centre. She was very earnest, too, and beginning to be æsthetic, given to standing against walls, with her dark-brown eyes immovably fixed on persons playing violins; given to Russian linen and embroidering book covers; to poetry and the sermons of preachers just unorthodox enough; dreamy, too, but puffing and starting at things that came too near. She was very attractive.

Going to college, one saw little more of Minna till she was twenty-two. She was working then at a “Settlement,” and looked unhappy and anæmic. Two months later we were told she had broken down. The work was too painful; her nerves had gone all wrong. She was taken abroad.

We did not see her again till she was twenty-six. She was then marrying a Quaker, a handsome, big fellow with reddish hair, ten years older than herself. More like a swaying lily than ever she looked in her long white veil. A tall, striking couple! The Quaker had warm eyes, and by the way he looked at her, one wondered.

Another four years had passed before I, at all events, saw much of Minna again. She was now thirty, and had three children, two girls and a boy, and was evidently soon to have another. There was a pathetic look in her eyes. They said that the Quaker should have been a Turk, for his physique was powerful and his principles extremely strict. His wife had grown to have a shrinking, fagged-out air, and worried terribly over her infants. She was visibly unhappy; had gone off, too, in looks; grown sallow and thin-cheeked, and seemed not to care to hold herself up.

I recollect the Quaker coming in one day, full of health and happiness, and putting his affectionate hand on her shoulder. To me--not to the Quaker, from whom many things were hidden--it was apparent that she flinched, and when his back was turned I saw in a mirror that she was actually trembling all over, and on her face an expression as if she saw before her suffering from which she could not possibly escape. It was clear that the quivering, lilylike creature had been brought almost to her last gasp by the physique and principles of that healthy, happy Quaker. It was quite painful to see one for whom life seemed so terribly too much.

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The collection opens with a narrator recalling Minna, a girl who initially hid in a bathroom to avoid strangers, then later climbed trees and fought fiercely. This early image of concealment and sudden exposure sets a pattern: Galsworthy’s satires often pivot between private anxiety and public performance. In “The Voice of ——!” and “A Simple Tale,” characters are defined by what they hide—ambition, fear, or emptiness—and the narratives shift abruptly between interior monologue and social tableau. The structure itself becomes a satirical tool, as scenes jump without transition, mirroring the disjointed nature of the lives depicted.

Hiding and Emergence as Structural Motif

The opening story, “Abracadabra,” establishes a motif of hiding and emergence that recurs throughout the collection. Minna’s bathroom concealment is described as a period when she was “but a symbol of shyness” before becoming a “body.” This movement from invisibility to physical presence—climbing trees, fighting, crying over a killed butterfly—echoes in later pieces. In “The Voice of ——!,” a character’s voice is repeatedly suppressed or anonymized, while in “A Simple Tale,” the protagonist’s inner life is hidden behind a facade of competition. Galsworthy often withholds full access to a character’s thoughts, then reveals them in sudden, unadorned sentences. The effect is a satire that works through what is not said as much as what is.

The Competitive Gaze and Its Objects

In the excerpt from “A Simple Tale,” the narrator tracks a judge’s obsessive comparison with friends named only as blanks: “—— and —— ——.” This use of dashes turns rivals into placeholders, satirizing the emptiness of social competition. The judge’s anxiety is rendered through concrete actions: he reads reviews “rather feverishly,” donates pictures to the National Gallery, and feels “joy” at a rival’s illness. Galsworthy’s prose here is clinical, listing each maneuver with deadpan precision. The recurring image of the “microbe of his own fate” suggests that the drive to compete is internal, not external. This section of the collection uses repetition—of phrases like “his friend ——”——to underscore the mechanical nature of ambition.

Abrupt Scene Shifts and Ironic Juxtaposition

Galsworthy moves between scenes with little warning, often cutting from a character’s private reflection to a public event. In “Abracadabra,” the narrative jumps from Minna’s childhood hiding to her later languid presence at dances, with no transitional explanation. Similarly, in “A Simple Tale,” the judge’s thoughts about his rival’s death are followed immediately by his decision to write a book. These shifts create an ironic distance: the reader sees the gap between inner motive and outer action. The structure itself becomes a satirical device, implying that social life is a series of disconnected performances. The collection’s title story, with its magical word, hints at the arbitrary power of such transformations.

Recurring Images of Physical Strain and Fragility

Throughout the excerpts, bodies are described in terms of strain or fragility. Minna has “very long legs and arms,” a “neck long as a turkey’s,” and “feet narrow as canoes.” The judge grows “perceptibly greyer” during weeks of waiting. These physical details are not merely decorative; they anchor the satire in the material world. Galsworthy uses hyperbole—Minna’s limbs, the judge’s greyness—to exaggerate the toll of social performance. In “Studies of Extravagance” and “For Love of Beasts,” this attention to the body likely continues, though the excerpts are incomplete. The recurring image of the body as awkward or strained reinforces the theme that social roles are ill-fitting costumes.

Readers attentive to Galsworthy’s structural choices will find that the collection’s abrupt transitions and recurring images of hiding, competition, and physical strain are not flaws but deliberate satirical tools. The dashes that replace names, the sudden scene changes, and the exaggerated bodies all work together to expose the absurdity of social striving. Approach these stories as a series of linked vignettes rather than a continuous narrative, and watch for the moments when the mask slips.

Reading about Minna crouched in that bathroom made me think of my grandmother’s giggle when she’d hide from visitors, a small game of pretend that felt so real. It brought back the same tender ache I felt with Scissors — Story, Setting & Ideas, where someone’s quiet self-doubt hummed beneath every careful cut. Both books leave me holding my breath for their hidden ones.