The long tale of the British short story

What makes the British short story special? In a trawl through thousands, Philip Hensher found a generous tradition that not only suits established writers but gives a platform to voices on the edge of society

Over the last two years, I undertook the task of reading as much of the British short story as I humanly could. Invited to prepare a Penguin Book of the British Short Story on a very substantial scale, I made the point to my commissioning editor that anthologies rarely seemed to be the product of much rigorous reading. Quite often one had the impression that the anthology editor’s choice depended on what authors he already knew. Most anthologies seem to have been produced after the editor had read at most 200 stories. In the end, I probably read 20,000.

There was something to be gained by assuming that one actually knew very little about the British short story. First, the known knowns. I wrote down 300 or 400 names of writers of fiction from the last 200 years and investigated their bibliographies. Next, the known unknowns. Library catalogues are peculiarly unhelpful in that they do not often distinguish between a novel and a collection of stories; still, the act of typing “and other stories” into the catalogues of the British Library and the London Library produced an immense number of interesting volumes by authors I knew of, as well as those I did not. (The subsequent task of trying to establish whether the author was British or not was sometimes rather more difficult.) Finally, I decided to read as much short fiction as I could in the context in which it first appeared: in magazines, journals, even newspapers.

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