Material Negotiations: Women Writing the Short Story

Abstract

The short story’s etymology begins, according to a bevy of critics, with its definition by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Twice-Told Tales’. In it, he asserted that the short story was a unique genre whose primary trait was unity of impression, a single effect created by the force of narrative totality—what happens when one reads a short story in one sitting. The short story did exist before 1880; however, in the 1880s and 1890s it became a linchpin of periodical literature. Dean Baldwin characterizes publishing conditions in the early Victorian period as ‘traditional, even a bit sleepy’ due to the dominance of triple-decker novels and the influence of lending libraries like Mudie’s, but as lending libraries began to collapse in the 1890s, so too did the three-volume novel’s stranglehold on the market. The short story’s profile in the literary periodical rose so quickly that writers such as H.G. Wells later exclaimed that in the 1890s, ‘short stories broke out everywhere’. The proliferation of periodicals enabled the rise of the short story as a complex genre notable for its diversity.