Therefore, using the Handbook's limit for a short story of 15,000 words and Gardner's suggestion that a novella doesn't begin until the 30,000 word mark, I'm going to concern myself with these odd-duck works which fall in between 15,000 and 30,000 words -- according to my own painstaking calculations. I know these word counts mean very little to the typical reader, who will sense that a work is short or long or medium or very long or very short, but who won't think in terms of the actual number of words. So here are some commonly taught novels and a couple of frequently anthologized short stories: To Kill a Mockingbird (104,250 words), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(108,575), The Great Gatsby (47,104), Jane Eyre(191,500), "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (13,692), and "The Fall of the House of Usher" (6,710). In Gardner's novella range are books like Heart of Darkness (37,746) and Wide Sargasso Sea(45,499).
