On his usual Sunday afternoon stroll, the narrator, a French literature professor at a women's college, watches icicles dripping from a nearby eave with intense meditation.
He runs into D., a former colleague who casually informs him that Cynthia Vane, with whom the narrator had formerly had a short relationship, has died.
He attends parties along with Cynthia's circle of believers, and listens keenly to her theory that the dead control events great and small.
Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.At one point, the narrator alludes to a "novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to the author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as "Deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother."
Thus, this is the Nabokovian twist: at the end of the short story, the reader learns that the narrator is being unconsciously and mockingly influenced in both his writing and the events surrounding him by the dead sisters.
The apparent uniqueness of this narrative approach has created fame for this story, and Nabokov himself described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction'.
The trick ending of "The Vane Sisters" originally went unnoticed when the New Yorker rejected the story, and it was only revealed when Nabokov wrote a letter to the fiction editor, Katharine A.