‘Love’ has always been a topic of interest for people around the world. Poets, novelists,
painters, dancers have multiple works dedicated to ‘love’ and it seems they can’t get enough
of it. Friendship, anger, cares, jealousies are emotions attached to love and have been dealt
with by authors of the world. The ancient and the modern, the teens and the adults, males and
female are in awe of ‘love’. This makes it a very interesting subject for study. William
Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry has written almost 300 short stories on various
themes. He never failed to surprise the readers with a twist at the end of his stories. Pannalal
Patel is a celebrated Gujarati author who, like Henry, has almost 20 short story collection
under his name. He too has dealt with various themes including love, crime, sacrifice and
more. The current paper focuses on comparing the love stories by these authors. The selected
stories are The Gift of Magi and Witches’ Loaves by O. Henry and Sukh Dukh na Sathi and
Nirupay by Pannalal Patel. As both, the writers belonged to two entirely different places and
were active during a different time, the comparison of their stories will help to learn the idea
of ‘love’ as the authors see it and the treatment of ‘love’ in their stories.
The Glamor of Poetry: A Comparative Study of Zhang Ailing’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories
