In the melancholy story The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde turns to the superficiality of society and man, a theme that also reappears in the novel for which he is perhaps best known today, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The shory story is considered a response to the H.C. Andersen's saga The Nightingale. Common to the stories is the critique of the authors' contemporaries, but Wilde objects to Andersen's view of sacrifice and his preference for the natural over the artificial and allows his story to take a completely different turn.

Another sample of Oscar Wilde's short prose can be found in The Spinx Without a Secret, the story of a woman who seemingly harbours a dark secret.