Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
4 - The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
In May of 1897, the greatly prolific, and sometimes great, author and critic Margaret Oliphant wrote ‘A Preface: On the Ebb Tide’ describing ‘the strange discovery which a man makes when he finds himself carried away by the retiring waters, no longer coming in upon the top of the wave, but going out’. 1897 was Queen Victoria's jubilee year, and the coincidence of those celebrations for an aged monarch with the ebbing of the century, made for a cultural moment of reflection and a retrospective gaze over the long Victorian era.
In her own career, Oliphant had always been a canny and reliable author in touch with the cultural moment and the publishing market, so in her writing of an ‘ebb tide’ she was yet again in tune with her readership. But for Oliphant this was as much a personal ‘strange discovery’ of ending as it was cultural: she died just over a month after her preface was published, but even in this preface to a book of short stories she was not writing about death itself, but – to her mind – the more difficult ending of a career. She contemplates the artist's realization that the public is no longer interested in his or her work, even though he or she still feels a vigorous creativity. In fact ‘On the Ebb Tide’ introduces her book of short stories The Ways of Life (1897) that republished ‘Mr Sandford’ (1888) and ‘The Wonderful History of Mr Robert Dalyell’ (1892). In each of these stories, the artist outlives the acclaim and respect of his public.
After she died the critics wrote of Oliphant that she had not outlived her relevance or become simply a voice of the past, and that her reputation would survive. Perhaps they were being kind, because it has to be admitted that Oliphant's work did not, unlike that of Anthony Trollope, to whom she was often compared, survive the modernist rejection of the Victorian three-decker novel, the ‘potboiler,’ and what was deemed to be the stuffy morality and heavy detail of plot and description in the novel and short fiction.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 67 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016
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