There are also those who point to Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays (1881–1904) and Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" (1890), and "Mysteries" (1892) as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique at the end of the nineteenth-century. While "Hunger" is widely seen as a classic of world literature and a groundbreaking modernist novel, "Mysteries" is also considered a pioneer work. It has been claimed that Hamsun was way ahead of his time with the use of stream of consciousness in two chapters in particular of this novel. British author Robert Ferguson said: "There’s a lot of dreamlike aspects of "Mysteries". In that book ... it is ... two chapters, where he actually invents stream of consciousness writing, in the early 1890s. This was long before Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce". Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as "Portrait of a Lady" (1881). It has been suggested that he influenced later stream-of-consciousness writers, including Virginia Woolf, who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them.