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  More of This World or Maybe...

  Barb Johnson

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  The lives of four unlikely friends intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans. Living amid poverty and violence, these fragile heroes of the American underclass redefine our notions of family, redemption, and love.

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Mary Diana Dods, Charles...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  New Eve and Old Adam

  D H Lawrence

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  'New Eve and Old Adam' was written by D H Lawrence in 1912.  The story is largely autobiographical, telling the simple tale of an argument between a husband and wife, reflecting the difficult time Lawrence and his new wife Frieda were having. What was the place of a woman to be in a modern marriage? Lawrence argued that it was the woman's place to submit or unhappiness would ensue at it did in this story. The wife is unable to submit to her husband and the marriage disintegrates.

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  Green Unpleasant Land

  Corinne Fowler

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  Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021
  Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.
  Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain's cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons' ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness.

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  The Other Sense

  J. S. Fletcher

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  Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian golden age of the short story. 
  "The Other Sense" is the story of a young man, Angus MacIntyre, whose ability to see phenomena - ghosts in particular - which other people cannot has caused his guardian to think he is insane and send him to stay with Dr. Schreiber, who is specialised in mental disorders. While there, Angus begins to see the spectre of a pale young man who appears to be seeking something in the doctor's house and garden. Together with the doctor, Angus sets out to solve the mystery.

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  Hard Times (version 2) Locked...

  Charles Dickens

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  Hard Times was Dickens's shortest novel and the only one to be set in the industrial north of England. A fast moving story with a typical cast of larger than life characters, the novel is a vehicle for a humanist critique of both utilitarian education ('Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts', says Mr. Gradgrind in the opening paragraph) and the mutual antagonism between capital and the trade union. A humanist education system, it turns out, is Dickens's solution to the class struggle. Hard Times is set in the fictional Coketown and was partly inspired by a visit to Preston during the factory lockout that brought the town's industry to a standstill in 1853. This version is read as it appeared in 20 issues of Dickens's weekly Household Words from April to August 1854. It is followed by two earlier articles - Locked Out and On Strike - that describe Dickens' visit to Preston and do much to clarify his thinking on education and class conflict. - Summary by Phil Benson

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