English Short Fiction

Most critics agree that the short story had its true beginnings in England with the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888. This is not to suggest that no short fiction was written in England before that time. However, with few exceptions, no short stories in English literature became part of the generally agreed-upon corpus of the short-story form until the late nineteenth century. Such a judgment can be verified by a cursory analysis of the two means by which short stories maintain their staying power and influence—inclusion in college texts and analysis and interpretation by academic critics. British short fiction is generally ignored by critics, even though several historians of the form have suggested that the short story's development in the United States in the early nineteenth century owes much to generic forms predominant in England in the eighteenth century. Washington Irving’s success was due as much to his use of eighteenth-century English essay conventions as to his use of folklore material.

Daniel Defoe

The earliest short narrative in English literature to contribute to the development of the short story is Daniel Defoe’s “ “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal” (1706). In addition to being cited as an early example of the old moral tale joined with the new novelistic narrative of verisimilitude, the piece has also been called an example of the gothic mode that began to dominate English short fiction later. It presents the kind of ghostly apparition that, before the eighteenth century, might well have been accepted in folklore stories as an article of belief and faith. Thus, the story attempts to validate what was not necessarily needed before that time to be validated. “A True Relation” looks both backward to a traditional form of short narrative—the fable presented to teach a moral lesson—and forward to the realistic story presented for its own sake as an account of an actual event. It anticipates the experiment with both modes, marking the beginning of the gothic romance.

Oliver Goldsmith

Conversely, the best-known eighteenth-century short narrative typical of the basic conventions of the moral tale—the character sketch in an essay with moral purpose—is Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Disabled Soldier” (1760). The significance of the piece in terms of short-fiction conventions is that it focuses on the misery of the little man rather than on the misfortune of the great one—an emphasis that Frank O’Connor has suggested is characteristic of the short story since its beginnings with Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Goldsmith’s frame reflections suggest a radical difference between the tragic and the epic forms that gave rise to the novel and the folktale form that gave rise to the short story. In the former, the tragic and epic structure is the hero’s high stature, the incongruity of his consequent fall, and the resultant declamation that he has suffered more than he can bear. For the little man, for whom distress is the ordinary course of things, calamity poses no incongruity, no cause for complaint, and thus no reason for his life to be the subject of a tragic or epic form.

Horace Walpole

The first single work of short fiction in English literature to set the tone for all nineteenth-century English short fiction is Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto" (1765), in which Walpole self-consciously decides to combine conventions of realism and romance. In his preface, Walpole posits the story is an attempt to blend ancient and modern romance. Noting that fancy had been eliminated by adherence to common life in modern romance and that, in ancient romance, nature or reality was excluded, Walpole wished to make his characters think, speak, and act as it might be supposed mere men and women do, in “extraordinary positions.” However, because Walpole’s ordinary people are placed in extraordinary situations, they do not remain “ordinary—that is, “as-if-real” characters—they become transformed into illustrative figures. It is not simply the gothic trappings and decorations that constitute gothic fiction; it is in addition “as-if-real” people being placed in “traditional” romance stories to be transformed into archetypes of the traditional story.

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb’s “Dream Children” (1822), because of its narrative movement and its management of time between the present and the past, is a central example of the emergence of the short story from the essay at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It also anticipates the short story in depending upon a surprise ending in which storytelling itself is revealed to be reverie. On a first reading of “Dream Children,” one has no reason to doubt the actuality of the dramatic event described: that of the narrator’s children sitting around him to hear about their great-grandmother and their uncle—that is, until the end of the piece when the narrator awakens and finds himself in his bachelor armchair. The story combines dreams and memories. The tale the narrator tells to the children is memory but the children themselves are a product of projective imagination. It is revealed at the conclusion that the teller is an old bachelor and that the children are only those who might have been.

The short story in the nineteenth century differs from earlier short fiction because it combines the following previous generic conventions—the sacred and symbolic tale of romance and folk ballad, the personal voice of the eighteenth-century essay, the focus on the everyday reality of the realistic novel, and the sense of reality as an imaginative projection of Romantic poetry. The union of these seemingly incompatible conventions is a new tradition of short fiction that first came to full flower in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century but whose traces can be found in short fiction in England a generation earlier. However, by the mid-nineteenth century in England, the impulse toward focusing on experiences outside the realm of the every day, and thus making action reveal the “mystery” of existence, is suppressed in favor of the realistic novel.

Charles Dickens

The great novelists of the period occasionally venture into the form, although somewhat reluctantly. Charles Dickens’s story “The Signalman” (1866) projects two different realms—the everyday world from which the narrator descends to his meeting with the signalman and the world of the signalman, which is at the bottom of a steep cutting made through clammy stone that gets oozier and wetter as the narrator climbs down a long, zigzag path and from which only a strip of sky is visible. In one direction is an extension of the dungeonlike cutting; in the other direction is a black tunnel. Having left the natural world for the underground world of metaphor and mystery, of secret signs and symbols, the narrator begins to have the “monstrous thought” that the signalman is a spirit rather than a man.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is another nineteenth-century author whose short fiction is overshadowed by his novels. His most popular story, “The Three Strangers” (1883), is a typical ballad or folklore tale of irony. The appeal of the tale lies in the simple irony discovered in the end: the first stranger who has appears at the party is the condemned man-the second stranger, the hangman, is to hang the next day. The further appeal to the folk story which transforms the condemned man into a subject of a ballad here, is the cool and daring way that he “hobnobs” with the hangman, joining in the jovial hangman’s gallows humor, which so horrifies the rest of the guests. The irony of the title is made clear when the third man knocks at the door and, seeing who is there, bolts away without a word. He is chased in an incompetent Keystone Kops fashion; when he is caught, the constable reveals the mysterious conundrum that serves as the central puzzle of the story. The third man is revealed to be the brother of the first man, the poor clock-maker condemned to die for stealing sheep. The people applaud his bravery, and he becomes the subject of folk speculation, and thus, the subject of the ballad and folk story itself.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It is no coincidence that Robert Louis Stevenson, the first British writer to be recognized as a specialist in the short story, is also the champion of the romance form in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Nor is it a coincidence that this short-story specialist was one of the first British short-fiction writers to focus, as did Henry James, on technique and form rather than on content alone. “A Lodging for the Night” (1877), one of Stevenson’s best-known stories, is a strange candidate for a landmark story that marks the shift to modern short fiction. Stevenson creates a story about the artist who transforms reality into art stuff, even as Stevenson himself transforms the details of the story into art. The story is an exercise in this paradox, indicating that reality must be dealt with both in terms of practical existence and of an ambiguous mixture of amusement and horror, for life and death must be mocked to transform them into art at all.

Joseph Conrad

A central problem for short-story writers in the nineteenth century was how to communicate realistically the secret psychic life formerly presented allegorically in the mythic romance. In the older tale or romance, characters functioned as psychic projections of basic human fears and desires; in the new fiction, the characters had to be presented as if they were real. The problem for early narrative experimentalists was how to bridge the gap between romance conventions, in which characters embody psychic states, and realistic conventions, in which they possess psychic states.

Joseph Conrad confronts the problem explicitly in one of his most famous stories, “The Secret Sharer” (1910), in which he seeks a way to enable a central character to deal with an inner conflict by projecting that conflict outside himself. The captain in Conrad’s story is Hamlet-like in his preoccupation with his own lack of definition. Thus, much as Hamlet creates a play within a play to project his conflict outward so that he can cope with it, Conrad’s young captain creates the character of Leggatt to provide himself with the means by which he can deal with his own insecurity and establish his own identity. Conrad pushes to metaphoric extremes the common psychological phenomenon that an inner conflict creates a split in the self so that it seems as if there are two separate voices engaged in a dialogue. Leggatt is the objectified side of the captain’s Hamlet-like, preoccupied, subjective self. The story thus is split between the plot, which focuses on the captain’s efforts to protect and conceal the mysterious stranger, and the mind of the captain, who obsessively persists in perceiving and describing the stranger as his other self, his double. The difference between the way Conrad’s story handles the night journey myth and the way it is handled in the old romance form is that, in Conrad’s story, both the captain and Leggatt are presented as if they had an objective existence in the world. However, even though Leggatt seems objectively to be real, he is the self-conscious image of the fictional character as an authorial projection. This objectification of inner reality marks the beginning of the modern mythical method of fictional narration.

Saki

Because Saki (H. H. Munro) marks a shift in Edwardian short fiction to the trick-ending story that dominated popular short stories both in England and the United States at the turn of the century, his stories often focus on the nature of the story itself. Saki’s most anthologized story, “The Open Window” (1914), is a clear example of a fiction that depends for its impact on the means by which the story works. Frampton Nuttel goes to the country for his health and calls at the home of a woman to whom his sister has referred him. While waiting for the woman, Nuttel hears a story from the niece about a great tragedy that occurred three years earlier when the aunt’s husband and her two younger brothers went hunting and were lost in a bog. Just as the niece Vera tells Nuttel that the aunt keeps the window open for the men in case they should return, the aunt enters for a desultory conversation until, quite expectantly, she sees three men coming in toward the window. Nuttel, terrified of what he thinks are ghosts, bolts out. It is only when Vera begins her next tale that the reader knows that Nuttel and the reader have been made the butt of Saki’s story-made joke. Vera is indeed the typical Saki artist who manipulates the reader into various possibilities about the genre of the story, only to reveal that it is about the process of turning fantasy into supposed fact.

D. H. Lawrence

DD. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” (1914) is representative of his favorite theme of so-called “blood consciousness” and his customary narrative technique of combining the realistic with the mythic. The story's plot is so simple, and its two characters are so stark that they are archetypal. An aristocratic Prussian captain becomes obsessed with his uncomplicated young orderly but deals with the obsession by repressing it, humiliating and physically mistreating the young man. The story reaches its climax when the orderly kills the officer, destroying the world of everyday reality for the young man and launching him into an alienated psychic state that leads to his death. Just as the officer seems driven by forces outside his control and understanding, the orderly responds in a primitive, unthinking manner. The movement toward unreality in which the two characters become transformed by their passion is a typical Lawrentian structural device by which conventional characters are transfigured into depersonalized representatives of states of mind. The orderly’s murder of the captain, which is presented in unmistakable sexual terms, completes the young man’s alienation from the ordinary world. His death seems an inevitable and even anticlimactic consequence of his complete distancing from the world.

Rudyard Kipling

Although Stevenson was the first British writer to build his career on the short story form, Kipling was the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short story form wholeheartedly. His stories are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern short story—a transition, however, which Conrad, because of the profundity of his vision, perhaps was better able to make than Kipling. Kipling’s most famous story, “The Gardener” (1926), depends on its effect on the concealment of an inner life when the character Helen goes to the cemetery to visit the grave of her illegitimate son and meets a man she is supposed to be the gardener, thus echoing the mistake of Mary Magdalene when she goes to the tomb and meets Jesus. The impact of the tale's conclusion depends, of course, on the fact that Kipling has concealed the truth about the boy being Helen’s son throughout the story. The basic technique of the story depends on a gap between details that are “public property” and unwritten details that are private property, known only to Helen herself. What is public is a lie, and what is private is the truth. The true reality of the story is the reality of the sacred and always hidden world, which is sacred precisely because of its hidden nature. As is usually the case in short fiction, the world of spirit, the world of the sacred, constitutes the truth.

Katherine Mansfield

Like Anton Chekhov, whom she greatly admired, Katherine Mansfield was often accused of writing sketches instead of stories because her works did not manifest the plotted action of nineteenth-century short fiction. The best-known Mansfield story, similar in technique and theme to the typical Chekhov story, is “The Fly” (1922), which, like Chekhov’s famous story “Misery” (1886), explores the incommunicable nature of grief by maintaining a strictly objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to communicate the latent significance of the boss’s emotional state. However, Mansfield differs from her mentor, Chekhov, by placing more dependence on the fly as a symbol. Moreover, instead of focusing on the inarticulate nature of grief that goes deeper than words, “The Fly” seems to emphasize the transitory nature of grief. Regardless of how much the boss would like to hold on to his grief for his son, he finds it increasingly difficult to maintain such feelings. Such an inevitable loss of grief does not necessarily suggest that the boss’s feelings for his son are negligible. Rather, it suggests a subtle aspect of grief—that it must flow naturally or not at all. The subtle way that Mansfield communicates the complexity of the boss’s emotional situation through the seemingly irrelevant conversation with his old acquaintance and by his idle toying with the fly is typical of the Chekhovian device of allowing objective detail to communicate complex states of feeling.

A. E. Coppard

A common critical comment made about the stories of A. E. Coppard, one of the few writers of his generation who remained dedicated to the short story, was that his stories combined two conflicting aspects: realism and simple earthiness on the one hand and fairy-tale fantasy and sophistication on the other. H. E. Bates, who argued that in Coppard, there existed a “strange battle between tale-telling at its simplest and tale-telling at its most sophisticated,” complained that the second type overwhelmed the first, resulting in stories that were too carefully elaborated. “The Field of Mustard” (1926), often said to be Coppard’s finest story, is a good example of the combination of realism and lyricism that placed him within the tradition of Guy de Maupassant. It is also the best example of what O’Connor called Coppard’s “inner compulsion” to write one kind of story over and over again, the story in which the motivation is given by some woman’s secretiveness. In a story that centers on the seemingly simple conversation between two peasant women, Coppard uses repetitive imagery of the natural world and the inevitability of death to make this a meditation on lost possibilities, fatalistic foreboding, and unspeakable desires. One of the most admired of his fantasy stories is “Arabesque: The Mouse” (1921), which, although it has a lighter touch than “The Field of Mustard,” shares with it the theme of missed opportunities and the inexplicable nature of physical reality’s vulnerability to mutilation and death.

H. E. Bates

“The Mill” (1935), the best known and most highly praised of H. E. Bates’s (1905-1974) short stories, illustrates the implications of so-called naturalism in the short story form. The story of a country girl away from home sets up a rhythm of routine reality for the central character, Alice, who is more acted-upon than acting and who lives a life that is almost unconscious. When the character Mr. Holland sees Alice’s body, “the mirage of Alice’s breasts in the candlelight” puts flesh on her, as do the shadows, but this becomes real later on when she is pregnant. When she walks with her son Albert, she remembers herself, feels the “burden of her body,” and exists in a state of wonder. Alice feels an odd sense of tenderness about Albert that she cannot explain on her walk home. However, while this is going on inside her, she walks as if nothing has happened, and her eyes have the same dull, mute complacency, as though she is half awake. It is when she says, “I’ve come back,” that her eyes fill with tears, and only the eyes show the depth of her emotion. “It was as though they had come to life at last.” “The Mill” is an interesting story about the secret or hidden life within one who seems to have no life at all. When “The Mill” was criticized as being too bleak, Bates responded that the story was a “study in two kinds of emotionlessness and how they affect each other.”

Somerset Maugham

Like most British writers of the twentieth century, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) is better known for his novels than for his short stories. He once said that the kind of short story he liked best was the kind he wrote himself, the kind that de Maupassant wrote, the kind one can tell at the dinner table and hold the attention of one’s listeners. This is exemplified in his two best-known stories, “Rain” (1921) and “The Outstation” (1924), both characterized by a relatively stark conflict between two different value systems. In “Rain,” the conflict is between the emblem of passion, the prostitute Sadie Thompson, and the spokesman for civilized restraint and propriety, the missionary Davidson, between the sensual self and the spiritual self, the id and the superego. In a story in which the rain itself is a central symbol of instinctual life, the story’s climactic revelation—that anyone who tries to ignore the instinctual is doomed to failure—is inevitable and predictable. “The Outstation” creates a similar basic dichotomy between two value systems, this time between the strict propriety and gentleman’s code of the empire and the rising tide of British democracy. To see the relative “slickness” of this story, one need only compare it to the more profound exploration of opposing value systems in Conrad’s “Outpost of Progress.” Maugham had no illusions about the popular nature of his short stories, and as a result, although he was entertaining, he added little or nothing to the development of the form.

Graham Greene

Although Graham Green (1904-1991) once said that his short stories were merely escapes from the novelist’s world, and although his stories seem to fit better in the world shared by his so-called “entertainments” than in the world of his more serious and more highly valued novels, Greene wrote some memorable stories that compare quite favorably with those of Mansfield and Lawrence. One of Greene’s best stories, certainly one that clearly represents a complex use of the short-story form, is “The Basement Room” (1935). Although the story is a traditional coming-of-age tale about a boy’s discovery of evil in the world and his resistance to entering the world of adult allegiances and responsibilities, Greene masterfully creates the story around a tapestry of imagery. The young boy, named Phil, often left by his parents in the care of the family servant Baines, senses that Baines is a captive of his wife’s cruelty. When Baines develops a relationship with a younger woman, he asks Phil to keep this a secret, thus making the boy an unwilling conspirator in “other people’s darkness.” Mrs. Baines comes to represent for Phil those ominous creatures of a child’s dreams, “the witch at the corner, the man with a knife.” This initiation into evil comes to a head when Mrs. Baines catches her husband and the young woman alone together and is accidentally killed. The story then shifts from a mythic initiation to a conventional detective story in which the police probe for an answer from the frightened child, a challenge that makes Phil extricate himself from “life, from love, from Baines with a merciless egotism.”

V. S. Pritchett

Bates once said that since the death of Lawrence, V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was England’s most outstanding short-story writer. Indeed, Pritchett has shown himself more appreciative of, and proficient in, the unique characteristics of the short story than other British writers of the twentieth century. Pritchett noted that whereas novels are bemusing, the short story “wakes the reader up.” Like short-story writers before and after him, Pritchett argues that the form answers the “primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox, and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.” Pritchett says that when he wrote “Sense of Humor” (1936)—the first story that earned him attention as a short-story writer, it was the language of the traveling salesman that most fascinated him, a mixture of the “comic and the second-rate,” indicating a temperament “coarse-grained or muddled,” a person who was both funny and painful at the same time. Pritchett can keep the reader unsure about whether to laugh or to cry, which constitutes the story’s brilliance. Pritchett says the character of the girl in “Sense of Humor,” who rejects her devoted suitor for the traveling salesman, springs entirely from her Irish background and exhibits what has come to be known as a traditional Celtic cruelty. The fact that Pritchett’s work largely has been ignored by contemporary critics has been attributed by some admirers of his work to his snubbing the novel in favor of the less appreciated short story.

Graham Swift

Graham Swift is often cited as one of the most important British postmodernists because his experimental novels examine the relationship between history and fiction. Whereas Swift deals with the large social and cultural issues of history in his novels, his short fictions focus more sharply on the nature of the story. The title story of his collection Learning to Swim (1985) begins with Mrs. Singleton, lying on a beach in Cornwall, watching her husband try to teach their six-year-old son Paul how to swim; however, most of the story takes place in her memory as she recalls having thought about leaving her husband three times in the past, primarily because of his lack of passion. The story then shifts to the two times Mr. Singleton had thought of leaving his wife—once when he considered jumping into the water and swimming away. Indeed, swimming is a central metaphor in the story. Mr. Singleton dreams of swimming; even when he makes love to his wife, he feels her body gets in the way, and he wants to swim through her. The story shifts finally to the boy, who fears that his mother will swallow him up and that he will not win his father's love if the boy fails to swim. Though he is terrified of the water, he knows if he swims, his mother will be forsaken. The story ends, in typical open-ended short-story fashion, with Paul swimming away from his father and his mother, finding himself in a strange new element that seems all his own.

Swift's further short stories are collected in England and Other Stories (2014). Additionally, he published several short stories in the New Yorker"Blushes" (2021), "Fireworks" (2022), "Hinges" (2022), and "Bruises" (2023).

Julian Barnes

Partly because of critical admiration of his novels and partly because of his narrative experiments with the short-story form, Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel (1996) received a great deal of positive attention. The collection is thematically a piece, with all the stories focusing on the British in France from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The stories also share the common characteristic of being grounded as much on historical facts and cultural values as they do on individual characters. Although this creates a strong factual context for the stories, giving them a sense of historical reality, it tends to make them focus more on social abstractions than on individuals. For example, “Dragons” focuses on the occupation of a Protestant village in southern France in the seventeenth century by paid mercenaries of Louis XIV. Three soldiers, or dragonnades, from the north are placed in the household of Pierre, a French carpenter. “Dragons” is an ironic story about persecution and social intolerance, told in the formal language and tones of the folktale. However, as the story progresses, it moves slowly from an anonymous folktale country to a precise historical context. The fact that the dragonnades are from Ireland seems a kind of poetic justice since the Irish also have been victims of religious persecution. Thus, the story does not resonate with cultural meaning until the reader knows the historical context.

Barnes’s second collection, The Lemon Table (2004), is obsessed with loss: loss of sexual vitality, loss of creativity, loss of mental acuity, and loss of romance. These stories have very little dignity, reconciliation, comfort, companionship, or other compensations of age. The book's title comes from the last story, “The Silence,” written in diary format, in the words of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in the thirty years of silence that extended into his eighties. In Barnes’s account, Sibelius was intrigued by the lemon as the symbol of death for the Chinese. He dines alone and reflects on mortality or with others at the lemon table, where it is permissible, even obligatory, to talk about death. “Cheer up!” he says, “Death is round the corner.” There is little to be cheerful about here, and none of the redeeming experimental verve for which Barnes has become famous.

A. S. Byatt

Bruno Bettelheim argued in the 1970s that fairy stories objectified complex fears, hopes, and anxieties, making it possible for children to deal with them. A. S. Byatt (1936-2023) agreed that the fables that thrill and haunt childhood embody the secret and the unspeakable. The first line of the opening story in her collection Little Black Book of Stories (2003) is in fairy-tale format, “There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest.” Having been sent to the safety of the country from the concrete horrors of the World War II bombing of London, the girls meet on the train and are drawn together by homesickness and fear. The “thing in the forest” of the title is a traditional northern England boogeyman, a dragon or worm that insinuates itself into one’s inner life, a constant reminder that there are always monsters under the bed, in the closet, and in the woods. Told in the hypnotizing voice of the classic storyteller, the tale has a haunting purity that lovers of fairy tales will find familiar. “A Stone Woman” is based on a more beautiful, albeit horrifying concept (seemingly contradictory notions that fairy-tale fans will find perfectly compatible). After the death of her mother, a woman at first seems to literalize the metaphor of “turning to stone” because of grief. However, it is not so simple. As the woman’s body becomes a beautiful composite of gorgeous minerals, she flees the flesh itself. With the help of an awed stonecutter, she finally escapes into the frozen world of Icelandic myth and the ultimate immortality of the cold, pure work of art.

Although British writers and readers have traditionally favored the long-form novel, short stories experienced a new wave of interest in England in the twenty-first century, as several universities and organizations sponsored international conferences and developed “Save the Short Story” publicity campaigns. The crystalline short form may yet blossom in the land of the bulky novel. Another of Byatt's short story collections, Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories (2021), exemplifies this increasing popularity.

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