Brief Candles

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First edition cover (Chatto & Windus)

Brief Candles (1930), Aldous Huxley's fifth collection of short fiction, consists of the following four short stories:

  • "Chawdron"
  • "The Rest Cure"
  • "The Claxtons"
  • "After the Fireworks"

It takes its title from a line in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Works by Aldous Huxley
Novels
Short stories
  • "Happily Ever After"
  • "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers"
  • "Cynthia"
  • "The Bookshop"
  • "The Death of Lully"
  • "Sir Hercules"
  • "The Gioconda Smile"
  • "The Tillotson Banquet"
  • "Green Tunnels"
  • "Nuns at Luncheon"
  • "Little Mexican"
  • "Hubert and Minnie"
  • "Fard"
  • "The Portrait"
  • "Young Archimedes"
  • "Half Holiday"
  • "The Monocle"
  • "Fairy Godmother"
  • "Chawdron"
  • "The Rest Cure"
  • "The Claxtons"
  • "After the Fireworks"
  • "Jacob's Hands: A Fable" (published 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood
Short story
collections
Poetry
  • The Burning Wheel (1916)
  • Jonah (1917)
  • The Defeat of Youth (1918)
  • Leda (1920)
  • Arabia Infelix (1929)
  • The Cicadias and Other Poems (1931)
  • Collected Poetry (1971)
Travel writing
Essay
collections
  • On the Margin (1923)
  • Essays New and Old (1926)
  • Proper Studies (1927)
  • Do What You Will (1929)
  • Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
  • Music at Night (1931)
  • Texts and Pretexts (1932)
  • The Olive Tree (1936)
  • Ends and Means (1937)
  • Words and their Meanings (1940)
  • Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
  • Themes and Variations (1950)
  • The Doors of Perception (1954)
  • Adonis and the Alphabet (US title: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956)
  • Heaven and Hell (1956)
  • Collected Essays (1958)
  • Brave New World Revisited (1958)
  • Literature and Science (1963)
  • The Human Situation: 1959 Lectures at Santa Barbara (1977)
  • Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1999)
Screenplays
Non-fiction
Plays
  • The Discovery (based on Frances Sheridan) (1924)
  • The World of Light (1931)
  • The Gioconda Smile (adapted from the original in Mortal Coils) (1948)
  • The Genius and the Goddess (play version, with Betty Wendel) (1957)
  • The Ambassador of Captripedia (1965)
  • Now More Than Ever (1997)
Children's
books
Other books


"Brief Candles" was also the title of a verse play by Laurence Binyon published in 1938 but first performed in 1931 and written, according to Binyon in the Preface to the Golden Cockerel Press edition of the play, 12 years earlier. Binyon's play was a reconsideration of a portion of the story told by Shakespeare in "Richard III" with greater emphasis on the influence of Richard's mother on her son's actions. In Binyon's play the "brief candles", lit by his mother, the Duchess of York, and extinguished by Richard, are two actual candles symbolic of his two young nephews, soon to be killed.

"Brief Candles" is also the title of a fantasy novel written by Manning Coles.


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