Overview
The Ruling Passion is a collection of stories about people driven by a single dominant desire, habit, fear, ambition, or obsession. In tales of nature and human nature, the common thread is the idea that a person can appear rational and ordinary until some powerful inner motive takes control.
This title is catalogued in Classics & Literature. Its reading profile is Medium and Moderate, with themes including literature, emotion, ideas, romance, self development.
One-Page Summary
The Ruling Passion is a collection of stories about people driven by a single dominant desire, habit, fear, ambition, or obsession. In tales of nature and human nature, the common thread is the idea that a person can appear rational and ordinary until some powerful inner motive takes control. One character may be ruled by pride, another by love, greed, revenge, curiosity, or an attachment to the natural world. The stories use those ruling impulses to create conflict because a passion can both define a person and distort their judgment. The collection belongs to the broader tradition of moral and character-centered short fiction in which a single decision reveals the force of a hidden trait.
What makes such stories interesting is their compression. A novel may spend hundreds of pages showing how a person changes; a short story can reveal the same truth through one crisis. The pieces also move between human and natural subjects, suggesting that instinct, persistence, and desire are not uniquely human qualities. Read together, they become a study of behavior: what happens when the thing we want most becomes more important than everything else? The answer can be heroic, ridiculous, tragic, or unexpectedly tender. The collection’s strength lies in that variety and in its underlying curiosity about the forces that quietly govern people’s choices.
Key Themes
Literature: This title is tagged with literature as one of its main themes.
Emotion: This title is tagged with emotion as one of its main themes.
Ideas: This title is tagged with ideas as one of its main themes.
Romance: This title is tagged with romance as one of its main themes.
Self development: This title is tagged with self development as one of its main themes.