The Open Window

Why it matters

“The Open Window” is a comic story built like a trap. A man arrives for a polite visit; a girl he has never met tells him a story about the room he is sitting in; and the story’s whole engine is how quickly a confident voice can overwrite a nervous man’s sense of what is real. It is short, quick and funny, and it still reads as alive because its subject, the speed with which people believe what is told them with a straight face, has not aged. The English country house is only the stage.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, born in 1870 in Akyab, British Burma, who wrote witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories that satirise Edwardian society; he has been compared with O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. “The Open Window” first appeared in The Westminster Gazette on 18 November 1911 and was collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). It has since travelled: Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre broadcast it on radio in 1938, and it became an episode of the television series Tales of the Unexpected in 1984. Munro was killed in France in 1916, aged 45, so the body of work he left is compact.

Read it for control: how little Saki wastes, what each line tells you, and how the story makes you believe along with its victim. Notice the details of the room, the hostess’s small talk, and the moment the story turns on a fact the reader and the visitor see very differently. Then look for who is the cleverer party in the room, and whether the answer changes the second time around. It makes a good first read for anyone new to English-language short stories.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.