The Golden Age of British Short Stories 1890-1914

by Philip Hensher (editor)

'Excellent, entertaining and ingenious ... from Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle, this fine anthology celebrates one of the richest moments in Britain's literary history' Sunday Times

The quarter century between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain, fuelled by a large, eager new magazine readership. The great writers of the age produced some of their finest work, and literary genres - the ghost story, science fiction - took shape. This richly varied, endlessly entertaining anthology brings together authors from Katherine Mansfield to Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce to Saki, H. G. Wells to Rebecca West. It celebrates a teeming, innovative world of literary achievement.

Edited with an introduction by Philip Hensher

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction

640 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2021

About the author

Hensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.

You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

When you take a look at some of the authors included in this anthology, you can see why the term 'Golden Age' might have been used. We have Oscar Wilde, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle (though not a Sherlock Holmes story), James Joyce, D.H Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Having said that the biggest enjoyment for me in reading this was discovering authors that I had never read or indeed sometimes never even heard of. W.S Gilbert with his comic, 'An Elixir of Life', George Moore with 'A Novel in a Nutshell', Barry Pain with 'The Autobiography of an Idea', Arnold Bennett with 'The Death of Simon Fuge' and Rebecca West with 'Indissoluble Matrimony' were my favorites and I've gone on to read or purchase more work by these authors.

From what I remember -and this is what comes of writing reviews four months after you finish a book- there weren't any really terrible stories but there are quite a lot of average ones. The themes and structure tend to blur together and so this is definitely a collection that shouldn't be powered through although I'm not sure why you would. It was an interesting window into a particular and quite narrow period of short story writing when various periodicals who specialized in such would come and go as Philip Hensher describes in his introduction. Not a stunning collection but worthwhile if only to discover those hidden gems.

[Seher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad I read this! I found some really lovely stories in here, things that I normally never would have read. My favourite is definitely The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit. I also really loved A.V.Laider, Old Caters Money, and The Autobiography of an Idea.

I was about to list other stories, but then I realised that I like 21 out of the 34 stories here which is a pretty good.

I would really recommend this collection!

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big anthology of 34 stories. It is aggressively eclectic.

Henshaw includes stories by big name popular writers like Kipling and H. G. Wells. He has a sampling of clever witty stories with Saki and G. K. Chesterton. He has stories by literary heavyweights like James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. He has stories by the great authors of the day, including Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

He has wild cards. His Arthur Conan Doyle story is not a Sherlock Holmes story. The author's note for the story by J. E. Malloch is, in its entirety, " No information about the identity of life of this contributor to the "English Review" has yet surfaced."

Henshaw's introduction tries to come up with a theory about the boom in short stories in pre-WW1 England. I suspect the most significant cause is the rise of well paying magazines. Authors could make good money selling short stories.

A similar anthology of great stories could be written for the twenty five years from 1915 to 1940 in America. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Hara, Chandler, Hammett, Hurston, Thurber, Runyon, Lardner and a bunch more were all making good money selling short stories to the magazines. I would love to see that anthology.

The Henry James story in this anthology, "The Figure In The Carpet", was the first Henry James story I have ever enjoyed. Maybe I am finally maturing.

Bonus Vocabulary Word.
James Joyce in "An Encounter", "With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahoney I planned a day's miching". "Miching" = Skipping school, truancy.

[Milo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An acrobat, a spinning antelope, five-thousand-moles. This book is a flexible proposition. It is, in one sense, a Best Of compilation. That is the title’s proposition: the golden age: nectar of the gods. Here we expect the tall, the fine, the gleaming. Much is proffered. Almost every great author in this crossing of the centuries has an entry here; a couple of significant exceptions are justified as pre-great in the period. They all account themselves well; indeed, some surprises were in store. I had – on the back of Woolf-prejudice – written off Arnold Bennet as an obvious hack without reading a single word. I am thrown into disrepute. His story fuzzed with charm; a sensitive, funny exposition of a mystery with no real solution and no real drama. A thing that becomes less interesting, and more engrossing for that fact. Perhaps it is a little cute: I can take it. While an unrepentant advocate of Gilbert in the theatre I had never before read Gilbert in the magazine: I find his wit and whim fully survived. I wish he had written a great novel. Chesterton, who did write a great novel, and in such a way Gilbert might have, is given us here in his semi-disowned mystery stories, though perhaps I have again been hoodwinked: this one was a large dollop of lark. It does read a little like a man who, writing endless and obligatory stories, decides to push the boat as far as it will go. Perhaps it is the upper crust of an otherwise Barren Plain. But excellent nonetheless. There is a comfort in how predictable some of these entries prove: naturally Conrad does something on boat; Lawrence deals with repressed desire; H.G. Wells tackles a flying machine; Conan Doyle thrusts Man against the Maneater; Kipling makes thorough use of the en-word. A few curveballs curl about: E.M. Forster writes a fantasy story about an omnibus that goes to heaven; and of the Saki stories this is perhaps not the best representative of his smug prime. The book is not, of course, solely what it seems. While being a best of it is also a representative slice: it is very keen in the expression of multiple perspectives, scooping certain obscurities so as to illuminate the duskier corners of that celebrated tradition. A Jewish story; a story from the poor house; a story featuring ethnic ambiguity; we are to peep with such eyes as these. There is a risk, of course, in colouring a Golden Age with curiosities: we might find range in lieu of depth. One must always suspect the mysterious name who comes attached with an unlikely origin: these concepts are potentially linked. But such fears need be allayed: those stories make decent account of themselves, not throwing the book into questionable quality but transforming its double-purpose: it becomes not merely a cross-section of writing but of place. A sort of literary map of the pre, inter, and post Edwardian Britain; and perhaps better this way than to have included a few bonus stories from the recognized luminaries, as might have been another approach applied. Most curious to me was the sense of continuity: nearly all these stories are written in the first person; they nearly all blend into one another in general style (if the finer points prevail); I wonder if it is one of the great liberations or unfortunate tragedies of our present time that no such artistic movement, no such sameness across difference, could be identified in any given artistic current.

[Eamon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this overall to be an enjoyable, and interesting, collection of stories. My favourite would have to be “An Elixir of Love” by W. S. Gilbert, which contained so many elements that I love in stories. I was also a big fan of Barry Pain’s “The Autobiography of an Idea”, Arthur Morrison’s “Old Cater’s Money”, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Brazilian Cat”, E. W. Hornung’s “Gentlemen and Players” and G. K. Chesterton’s “The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit”.

Probably the story that made me think the most after reading was “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad, which I enjoyed a lot too.

On the other hand, in the way “An Elixir of Love” contained so much of what I love in a story, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Woman at the Store” contained so much of what I hate in stories, and I really struggled with the prose of authors like Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Charlotte Mew and Rebecca West. I felt like I’d recently suffered a stroke as I read those ones.

This collection has also made me intrigued to try more from certain authors too, like Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. All up, a worthwhile read.

[Alasdair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful range of stories. Although it covers a fairly short 25-year period there's a real change over this time - the stories from 1890 couldn't have been written in 1914 and vice versa. Inevitably some will be more to individuals' taste than others - I couldn't get on with Beerbohm and loved the Mansfield, others may feel the reverse, but it's great to get the sweep of styles. Introductory essay is superb too. Also a really handsome volume, even more so than the previous ones - but, and it became a major irritation especially in what ought to be so aesthetically pleasing a book, I have never, never read a book with so many typos, one every few pages.

[Malcolm Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed most of these stories and found nearly all of them gripping once I began reading them. However, because it concentrates on a certain period the writing styles are all in a similar vein and personally I found it worked better in some than others. That being said it was great to read so many short stories by such eminent writers.

[Diane Read · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed overall, will be continuing with the series..📚

[Erin Olejniczak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got better the longer I read it.