"Summer in Salander."

A novella involving a lifeless shipping clerk and an attractive, demanding woman who visits his island.

In the second volume of his autobiography (The Blossoming World, p 67), Bates would summarize the tale as follows: "a woman both rich and selfish sets out, having left her own husband, to destroy, rather after the manner of a spider with a fly, a young man she meets while on holiday on an island."

In a late essay ("H.E. Bates — By Himself") Bates cites this story as the rare case in which a work of imagination is later replicated in real life, with a "precise replica of the Mrs Vane of my story: rich, selfish, bored, running away from her husband and looking for someone to play cat and mouse with" appearing on board ship when Bates and his wife were returning to the island he used as the story's setting.

In Argosy (September 1955), Death of a Huntsman/Summer in Salander (1957), The Grapes of Paradise (1974), A Party for the Girls (1988).