Bad Dreams and Other Stories

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list, final year. Bad Dreams and Other Stories is a List 1 collection of short stories for Reading and responding to texts, and all ten stories are set for study. 2026 is its fourth year on the list and it is not on the 2027 list, so this is the last year it can be examined. VCAA's reference edition is Vintage (2018). In 2025, 2 per cent of students wrote on it in Section A. Some stories deal with a sexual encounter involving a fifteen-year-old, the force-feeding of a hunger striker, bereavement and an unwanted sexual advance.

The collection in brief

Bad Dreams and Other Stories (2017) gathers ten stories, seven of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Most follow a girl or woman at a moment of transition, often without her realising at the time that it is one. The settings run from a girls' school just before the First World War to present-day England, and the events are usually small: a lift in a car, a knock at the door, a borrowed dress, a gift. VCAA's annotation describes the collection as showing the large consequences of small actions and capturing characters' inner thoughts at turning points.

The ten stories, in the order they appear:

1. An Abduction. In Surrey in the 1960s, fifteen-year-old Jane Allsop, bored in the summer holidays from boarding school, accepts a lift from three young men home from Oxford. At the house of one of them, whose parents are away, the day drifts through drink, drugs and sex with a young man called Daniel, and she goes home the next morning to find that nobody noticed she was gone. A coda leaps forward through Jane's life: decades later she is still turning the day over, while Daniel does not remember it at all.
2. The Stain. Marina, a young working-class woman in an English village with a husband whose business is struggling and a young son, is hired to care for an elderly man who emigrated from South Africa. He grows fond of her and wants to give her money, which she refuses. His grandson tells her about the old man's past with South Africa's military in the apartheid era; the reader never hears the details. Soon afterwards the old man dies.
3. Deeds Not Words. At a girls' school on the eve of the First World War, Edith, a cynical teacher, is having an affair with a married colleague, Mr Briers, while another teacher, Laura Mulhouse, is imprisoned for breaking windows in a suffragette protest and force-fed when she goes on hunger strike. Laura returns diminished, the affair collapses and war breaks out; both women's defiant freedoms end in shame and silence. The title is the suffragettes' motto.
4. One Saturday Morning. Ten-year-old Carrie is home alone when Dom, a friend of her parents, calls with the news that his wife has died, and she has to keep him company. Later, at a party, she glimpses something between Dom and her mother that belongs to a reckless adult world closed to children, and she keeps it to herself.
5. Experience. Laura, twenty-eight and newly divorced, narrates. She house-sits the London home of Hana, an older, glamorous woman who has gone to Los Angeles, finds the key to a locked room and reads Hana's diaries of a passionate, sometimes violent affair with a married man, Julian. She starts wearing Hana's clothes. When Julian turns up, Laura steps into Hana's place with him, and the experience she gains is not the one she imagined.
6. Bad Dreams. A nine-year-old girl wakes from a nightmare in which she found a secret epilogue to Swallows and Amazons recounting what became of the children in later life, including their deaths. Wandering the family's moonlit basement flat, among her mother's tidy things and her father's trumpet case and study papers, she overturns the chairs in the sitting room and goes back to bed. Her mother finds the room, assumes her husband did it as a rebuke to her orderliness, tidies it and says nothing. Breakfast is ordinary.
7. Flight. Claire, a successful professional living in America, turns up unannounced with presents at the Leeds terrace where she and her sister Susan grew up, to see the new baby of Susan's daughter, Amy. Susan, a carer, has not spoken to her since Claire insisted on her half of their parents' house. Susan locks herself in her bedroom and never comes out. Claire charms the rest of the family and hides an expensive silk scarf in Susan's work bag; Susan quietly puts it back in Claire's bag before leaving for work at dawn, and Claire leaves, relieved, with the scarf.
8. Under the Sign of the Moon. Greta, in her sixties and recovering from a serious illness, takes the train from London to Liverpool to visit her grown daughter, Kate. A young man opposite, Mitchell, old-fashioned in manner and dress and recently bereaved, draws her into conversation and suggests they meet later in the week. Memories of her past, including Kate's father, surface on the journey. Greta keeps the appointment, and the meeting turns disturbing.
9. Her Share of Sorrow. Ten-year-old Ruby, the dreamy disappointment in a family of elegant high achievers, finds Victorian sensation novels in the attic of the house where the family holidays in the South of France. At home she begins her own melodramatic novel; when her family discovers it and is gently amused, she abandons it by killing off her characters with a wasting fever.
10. Silk Brocade. In Bristol in 1953, Ann Gallagher, an ambitious young dressmaker, is given a length of silk brocade by Nola, an acquaintance she rather looks down on, to make Nola's wedding dress for her marriage into the family at Thwaite Park, a faded country house. Nola falls ill and dies before the wedding. Years later Ann makes the brocade into a jacket for her daughter, Sally, who leaves it behind at Thwaite Park.

Author and context

Tessa Hadley (born 1956 in Bristol) is a British novelist and short story writer who taught creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, and she won the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2016. Bad Dreams and Other Stories, her third collection, won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2018, and VCAA notes that it was a New York Times Notable Book.

Context you can use (always linked to a topic):

• The English social world. Class runs through the stories: the Surrey wealth of An Abduction, the working-class village of The Stain, the Leeds terrace of Flight, the country house of Silk Brocade. Hadley shows how class shapes what characters want and what they notice.
• History as backdrop. The suffragette campaign and the outbreak of war in Deeds Not Words, post-war Britain in Silk Brocade and apartheid South Africa in The Stain sit behind private lives. The large events are rarely centre stage; Hadley is interested in how they press on ordinary people.
• Women's lives across a century. The stories span roughly 1914 to the present, so they can be read together as a study of what has, and has not, changed in women's freedom to act, desire and speak.
• The modern short story. Hadley is often compared with Alice Munro. Like Munro, she builds stories around an ordinary moment whose significance only becomes clear later, sometimes with a leap forward in time.

Form, structure and style

• Close third-person narration. Most stories stay very close to one character's thoughts, so we see what she notices and misreads. Experience is the exception: Laura narrates in the first person.
• Shifts in perspective. Bad Dreams moves from the girl to her mother, and the second half reinterprets the first: the reader knows what the mother does not. Every Hadley story is worth asking whose view we are given, and whose is missing.
• Time leaps and codas. An Abduction ends by jumping decades ahead; Silk Brocade follows the fabric into Ann's future. These endings show a moment's consequences long after the event.
• Withheld information. In The Stain, the reader never hears exactly what the old man did. Hadley makes the not knowing part of the meaning: the stain is the knowledge itself, not a list of crimes.
• Telling objects. The overturned chairs, the silk scarf, the brocade, the diaries, the attic novels: objects carry feelings characters cannot say aloud, and often change hands.
• Quiet endings. Stories tend to close on a small action or a private decision rather than a dramatic resolution, which makes the reader do the interpretive work.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

Turning points and consequences

VCAA's annotation stresses the large consequences of small actions. A lift in a car (An Abduction), a visit (Flight), a borrowed dress (Experience) or an overturned chair (Bad Dreams) changes a life or a marriage. Hadley builds this through time leaps and endings that look back.

Knowledge and secrets

Knowledge is transformative and often costly. Marina cannot unknow the old man's past; Carrie cannot unsee what she glimpses; Laura reads what she was not meant to read. Hadley also shows knowledge as enlarging: Ruby discovers the power of story, Laura discovers her own appetite for life.

Knowing and misreading others

Characters constantly misjudge one another: the mother in Bad Dreams blames her husband; Greta cannot tell whether Mitchell is sincere; Marina did not see what the old man was. A 2024 VCAA topic proposed that the collection demonstrates the difficulties of truly knowing others.

Women's freedom, desire and shame

Jane, Edith, Laura Mulhouse and Greta all act on desire or conviction and meet limits: shame, silence, punishment or disappointment. A 2024 topic proposed that regret and shame determine experiences in the collection.

Childhood and the adult world

In One Saturday Morning, Bad Dreams and Her Share of Sorrow, children glimpse adult feelings, death or the power of imagination, and learn to keep what they know to themselves.

Class, family and belonging

Flight's sisters are divided by money and choices; Marina's family needs the old man's money; Ann both envies and looks down on the people she dresses. Family can be a place of belonging and of estrangement.

Key moments and why they matter

1. Jane gets into the car. A single choice made out of boredom becomes the defining secret of her life.
2. The coda of An Abduction. Jumping decades ahead shows how unevenly memory and consequence fall: she carries the day; he has forgotten it.
3. The grandson's revelation in The Stain. The reader is told that Marina learns the truth but not what it is, shifting attention to her response.
4. Laura Mulhouse's return in Deeds Not Words. Force-feeding has broken the teacher who embodied defiance, as war overtakes both women's private and public rebellions.
5. The overturned chairs. The girl's impulse to disrupt the stillness of home is misread by her mother, exposing a marriage's hidden resentments.
6. The scarf in Flight. A gift meant to heal the sisters' rift is silently returned; the object says what neither can.
7. Greta keeps the appointment. Choosing to meet a stranger is an act of freedom after illness, and the encounter's turn shows its risks.
8. Ruby kills off her characters. The family's gentle laughter ends her first experiment in imagination, a small moment with lasting weight.
9. The brocade becomes a jacket. Nola's gift outlives her and is casually abandoned, a closing image of how objects and people are forgotten.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values. For a collection, the exam instructions allow you to write on several stories, or on at least two in close detail.

In 2024, one topic, prefaced by a quotation about Greta from Under the Sign of the Moon, proposed that the collection demonstrates the difficulties of truly knowing others; the other, prefaced by a quotation about shame, proposed that regret and shame determine experiences in the collection. The 2024 report used that second topic to warn against dismissing the topic's concepts and substituting your own (for example, arguing that social circumstance, not regret and shame, is what matters, and then writing about that instead). In 2025, one topic asked how the collection depicts the consequences of crossing boundaries, and the other proposed that relationships act as catalysts for self-discovery. Expect topics on knowledge and secrets, turning points, relationships, shame, freedom, family and class.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. In Bad Dreams and Other Stories, the most important changes happen quietly. Discuss.
2. Hadley's characters are defined by what they do not say. Do you agree?
3. How does Hadley use objects to reveal what her characters cannot express?
4. Bad Dreams and Other Stories suggests that knowledge always comes at a cost. To what extent do you agree?
5. In Hadley's stories, women's freedom is always limited by others. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

Bad Dreams and Other Stories suggests that knowledge always comes at a cost. To what extent do you agree?

Contention

Hadley shows that knowledge, of other people, of the adult world and of oneself, usually arrives at a price: innocence, comfort, or a relationship. But she also presents knowledge as enlarging, and the cost falls unevenly, so "always" overstates her view.

Paragraph 1: knowledge that stains

In The Stain, Marina's discovery changes how she sees her work and her employer; Carrie in One Saturday Morning cannot unsee what she glimpses. Analyse Hadley's withholding of detail and the close narration that makes knowledge a burden the character carries alone.

Paragraph 2: knowledge that misleads

The mother in Bad Dreams thinks she knows who overturned the chairs, and is wrong. Analyse the shift in perspective, which lets the reader know more than any character, and what her silent misreading costs the marriage.

Paragraph 3: knowledge that enlarges

Laura in Experience and Ruby in Her Share of Sorrow gain knowledge of desire and of imagination. Analyse how Hadley presents these as gains, while showing the limits others place on them (the family's amusement).

Paragraph 4: who pays

The coda of An Abduction shows Jane carrying the knowledge of that day for decades while Daniel has forgotten it. Analyse the time leap as Hadley's comment on how unequally the cost of knowledge falls.

Conclusion

Hadley rarely lets knowledge come free, but she values it: her characters are changed by what they learn, and the stories ask the reader to learn alongside them.

Common pitfalls

• Retelling the stories. The plots are slight on purpose; marks come from analysing how Hadley makes small events significant.
• Ignoring perspective. Always ask whose consciousness the narration follows, and what that character cannot see.
• Treating every story as the same. The stories range across a century and several social worlds; use that range to show how Hadley's ideas vary.

Read the collection

Bad Dreams and Other Stories is in copyright, so this page analyses the stories without quoting them. VCAA's reference edition is Vintage (2018), available from your school or local library.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination and 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English 2024 examination and 2024 examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.