The strange history of the British short story and its reviewers

Abstract

Before the 1890s, reviewers of short stories treated short fiction as they treated the novel, judging it by the same or similar criteria. As the short story became popular and the number of magazines printing short stories increased dramatically, reviewers’ attitudes towards the short story began to change. Partly under the influence of Brander Matthews’ insistence that the short story must have ‘form’ (interpreted by most reviewers and editors as ‘plot’) and partly because of the growing rift between traditional and Modernist aesthetics – embodied for many reviewers in the Yellow Book – editors and reviewers began treating the short story as different from the novel, often elevating it to the realm of ‘art’. As a consequence, reviewers frequently denigrated popular stories as ‘machine made’ and Modernist stories as ‘gloomy’ or as ‘mere’ sketches. Reviewers thus contributed to the impression among readers that the short story was in theory superior to the novel but in practice inferior to it. This attitude was often reflected by authors themselves, many of whom tended to regard their own short stories as of lesser importance than their novels.