Small is beautiful: the heyday of the short story

What is the worthiest literary genre, poetry, drama or prose? The jury has been out on that one for centuries. However, when it comes to evaluating the formats of prose fiction, the case would appear to be very much closed. Simply stated, quantity is quality, with novels commanding the most respect, novellas deemed the next best thing, and the humble short story lowest of all in the pecking order. Many readers want novels because short stories don’t satisfy. Consequently, many publishers want novels because short stories don’t sell. Over the years, several misguided assumptions have hardened into standard beliefs. Firstly, novelists’ short story collections are side projects, perhaps even vanity projects, which are almost always inferior to their long-form work. Secondly, those who only write short stories are mere dabblers and dilettantes, lacking in scope and imagination, and unable to go the distance and last the pace. By extension, those who only read short stories are those who prefer a quick, easy, undemanding fix over something longer, more complex, and ultimately more stimulating. 

Unfortunately, these generalisations prevail. But it wasn’t ever thus. The quarter century before the First World War constituted a prolonged heyday for the British short story. Gone was the appetite for the three-volume novel; instead readers embraced the proliferation of short fiction. Practitioners such as MR James, Katherine Mansfield and Saki acquired such a dedicated readership that they didn’t need to write novels. Great stories by DH Lawrence, GK Chesterton or HG Wells could sit side by side with the authors’ novels, not as pale imitations but as equal companion pieces.

Short stories studded collections and anthologies during these glory years, but they also filled the pages of new magazines and journals. The Strand appeared in 1891 and its phenomenal gap-in-the-market success paved the way for the likes of Black and White, The Yellow Book and The English Review. Stories by big authors promised big sales: The Strand’s publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s latest Sherlock Holmes adventure could guarantee sales of half a million copies for that issue. Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Henry James or Joseph Conrad stamped a publication with a certain cachet. Magazines raised profiles, cemented reputations and demonstrated what magic could be produced with a reduced word-count and an abundance of talent.

An excellent new book showcases a wide range of stories from this period. More a pick-and-mix sampler than a comprehensive greatest hits, The Golden Age of British Short Stories 1890-1914 contains numerous delights. Its editor, Philip Hensher, previously presided over two other Penguin compilations of British short fiction, one dealing with contemporary stories, the other covering stories through the ages. Centering solely on the late Victorian and Edwardian era, his latest offering has clearly been a labour of love. He calls the age “one of the richest and most accomplished moments in literary history” and is effusive in his praise for his selected tales. We can carp at some of his omissions (where are John Buchan, Somerset Maugham and PG Wodehouse?) and question his sweeping statements (is this moment in literature really so remarkable, one that is “never likely to be repeated”?) but it is far more productive just to read and admire one fine story after another.

Just as the golden age of detective fiction encompasses Queens of Crime Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, and a host of lesser-known commoners, so too does the golden age of British short stories comprise both illustrious writers who are still read today and more marginal figures, some of whom have since drifted into obscurity. Accordingly, Hensher incorporates work by past masters – Kipling, Conrad, Wells, Lawrence – and less familiar names. In the main, the ignored or forgotten manage to hold their own alongside the great and the good. Mary Mann’s Women o’ Dulditch follows grudging Samaritan Dinah as she swallows her pride to help an old enemy in their Norfolk village. The remarkable feature is the colourful dialect: “She’s a-dyin’, I tell ye,” Dinah says, berating the woman’s feckless, neglectful husband. “Not a mite o’ nouragement i’ th’ house, sech as a pore suff’rin’ woman like Car’line’s in need of.” There is charity of a different nature in May Sinclair’s crisply comic Wilkinson’s Wife, in which a society woman tries to bag a man by securing his “deliverance” from his unattractive and uncultured other half.

Some of the featured female writers achieved success, and anonymity, by working under male noms de plume. Somerville and Ross, a.k.a. Edith Somerville and “Martin Ross”, the pseudonym of Violet Martin, formed a literary partnership which produced winning stories like Trinket’s Colt, a caper revolving around horse-theft from an Irish country estate. Australian-born Mary Chavelita Dunne adopted the pen-name George Egerton and was strongly associated with the “New Woman” feminist ideal of the 1890s. Her atmospheric tale about a young man who, one rainy November night, invites a dazed, soaked and starving woman into his Embankment bachelor pad (or “diggings”) builds in intrigue and momentum. In the cold light of day we learn of the cause of her distress while marvelling at the hints of missed opportunities and neat turns of phrase (“It was one of those beastly mornings, fine under protest, with a sun that looked as if he had been making a night of it”).

Hensher resurrects two writers who once captivated readers with fiction set against the backdrop of London’s East End. Arthur Morrison’s story is a grittily realistic slice of working-class life. Israel Zangwill’s tale is a more playful affair about a failed love match within the Jewish community and the attempt to reclaim an engagement ring. It is refreshing to see other overlooked writers given a new lease of life, from author and translator Ella d’Arcy to prolific powerhouse Barry Pain – to someone called JE Malloch. Hensher’s two-line biography states that nothing is known about the identity or life of this magazine-contributor.

Unsurprisingly, it is the stories from canonical writers which make the biggest impression. The collection is bookended by two classics, opening with Kipling’s perennial The Man Who Would be King and closing with Lawrence’s study of sexual tension and revenge, The Prussian Officer. In between there are such gems as Henry James’ enigmatic The Figure in the Carpet, Conrad’s intense tale of duality and duplicity The Secret Sharer, and one of EM Forster’s self-styled “fantasies” The Celestial Omnibus. Wells’ The Argonauts of the Air takes flight and soars, MR James’ The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is a masterclass in heart-stopping terror, and EW Hornung’s Gentlemen and Players proves to be one of the more enjoyable outings for his “Amateur Cracksman” anti-hero Raffles – here torn between his twin-pursuits of cricketing and stealing. “What’s the satisfaction of taking a man’s wicket,” he tells his friend Bunny, “when you want his spoons?”

Several stories stand out. Saki, once memorably described by VS Pritchett as “the man in the incredible waistcoat who throws a spanner in the teacup”, swaps his trademark satire for a foray into the uncanny. Gabriel-Ernest is a teasing, shocking tale about a savage, “strange-eyed, strange-tongued” youth who may well have poached game in the protagonist’s woodland property – and, with his appetite for “child-flesh”, may also be behind the disappearance of a local boy. George Gissing, best known for his 1891 novel New Grub Street, a portrait of struggling writers and hack journalists toiling in “the valley of the shadow of books”, switches his focus in The Peace Bringer to a dying man’s last pleasures and late wake-up call. The ailing Jaffray employs Mrs Lanyon to keep him company and play the piano. When she ends the transaction and leaves him he is distraught. He turns his attention to the wife he spurned, only to learn the hard way that it is not love she feels for him but pity. The home truth she fells him with is simple and logical: “I was never able – never in my life – to have affection for anyone who had none for me.” 

Hensher’s prize pick is Arnold Bennett’s The Death of Simon Fuge. At over fifty pages it is the longest story in the anthology and one of few that can be described as truly immersive. It was published in Bennett’s second collection of stories The Grim Smile of the Five Towns in 1907, a year before his breakthrough novel The Old Wives’ Tale. Boiled down to its basics, it tells of London-based Loring’s trip to the Five Towns (Bennett’s fictionalised version of the Potteries), an expedition which turns out to be both absorbing and edifying. Out of his comfort zone in the provincial, industrial north, Loring finds commonalities with the south and also stark differences, enjoys a series of diverse, eye-opening experiences, and pieces together key events in the life of a recently deceased painter who was native to “this strange parcel of England”.

In his bibliographical note to Bennett, Hensher makes mention of Virginia Woolf’s “toxic but naïve essay about his ingenious and well-made work” which “continues to mislead readers about its profound merits.” That essay from 1921 was Modern Fiction, and it took the form of a hatchet-job on Bennett, Wells and John Galsworthy. Woolf offers faint praise to Bennett (he is a fine “workman”) but then goes on to dismiss all three authors as “materialists”. For her, Bennett’s characters “live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?” As a critical essay it is self-satisfied and wrong-headed, with Woolf stubbornly, maybe even deliberately, ignoring Bennett’s expert ability to depict people and place. Hensher is right to knock it. He could have strengthened his point by quoting Bennett’s biographer Margaret Drabble, who called The Death of Simon Fuge “one of the greatest short stories in the English language.”

Hensher’s bite-sized biographies contain other noteworthy comments. There is curious trivia: EF Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia novels, his mother and four of his five siblings were homosexual; Charlotte Mew committed suicide “using the cheapest poison available”; Somerville and Ross were politically divergent, the former an Irish nationalist, the latter a Unionist. There are also witty phrasings, intentional or otherwise: Saki was raised by “forceful” aunts; Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester house is “a work of stunning incompetence”. It is a pity that these biographies do not give the publication date of each writer’s story. It is also a pity that some of Hensher’s tales fall outside his designated 1890-1914 timeframe: the Kipling story was published in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx without a Secret in 1887, and WS Gilbert’s An Elixir of Love even earlier in 1876.

Dubious dating is one problem, unappealing content is another. Not every story entrances. A stodgy old tale from GK Chesterton makes for a baffling choice when we consider that this most industrious of writers left behind such a plentiful oeuvre. An Encounter is one of the less involving episodes from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Similarly, there are more sparkling gems to be found within Mansfield’s five collections of short stories than the comparatively lacklustre The Woman at the Store.

But then there is no pleasing everyone, especially regarding an anthology of 34 stories by 34 different writers. Fortunately, there is much to admire and much to be surprised at. Mew was more famous as a poet, Hardy more celebrated as a novelist and a poet, and Rebecca West more renowned for her non-fiction, yet all three deliver compelling short stories. In an inspired move, Hensher shuns Sherlock Holmes and gives us a tale of the unexpected from Conan Doyle: not one about a Baskerville hound but a Brazilian cat. Again and again we come across stories which not only entertain but also show an awareness of, and an engagement with, the issues of the day, whether social, political or sexual.

A good, short, self-contained story leaves the reader wanting more. For the most part, Hensher’s rich pickings have that desired effect, serving as incentives to delve deeper into undiscovered work, both by new faces and old hands.

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