Steering clear of the Blimps

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories edited by A.S. Byatt OUP 439pp, £19.99 in UK

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories edited by A.S. Byatt OUP 439pp, £19.99 in UK

`It is not quite nice to think about being English," writes A.S. Byatt in her introduction to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Her anthology is the first specifically to take the English short story as its theme, and she is expansive on the problematics of such a venture.

First, Byatt finds there is some "linguistic confusion between `short stories in English' and `English short stories' ", because many anthologies have included, say, James Joyce as an "English" writer. Second, she is reluctant to think "about Englishness" because "the English are what other English-speakers define themselves against. They are seen as imperialist, insular, nostalgic for merrie England, class-ridden, complacent".

"Stringent about the Englishness of the writers" she has chosen, she tells us she did not look for stories that would give images of England or of the Empire. She also tries to have "no preconceptions of any `English' styles or subject matter". Her only criterion was that those stories she selected should be works of art, "both the writing and the story should be startling and satisfying . . . make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement".

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The classic short story, unified in form and developing a single idea, is eschewed in favour of more plastic works which pack together "comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque".

Given the conditions Byatt imposed on her subject matter, the resulting anthology of thirty-seven stories spanning the 19th and 20th centuries hang together remarkably well. There are many "threads of connection and contrast"; one such is social realism: Mary Mann's tale of rural poverty set in Norfolk concerns the dreadfully impoverished Hodd family. So poor are they that the two youngest children must use their dead baby brother as a doll. Thomas Hardy's "A Mere Interlude" concerns a reluctant bride's deceit facing a December-May marriage.

Surreal fantasy is represented by William Gilbert, Ronald Firbank, Virginia Woolf through to the science fantasy of J.G. Ballard and Ian McEwan, who in "Solid Geometry" makes a wife "disappear" almost completely by transposing "the nobility of the human form into a contortionist's nightmare".

Writers of sensibility include H.E. Bates, Elizabeth Taylor and D.H. Lawrence, whose sublime story "The Man Who Loved Islands", is about a man moving from island to island all the time paring down his world and eventually detaching from it until he is reduced to a mere dot between sea and sky. Writers of insensibility include P.G. Wodehouse, Saki and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's "An Englishman's Home" pits privileged environmentalists ("not in my backyard" types) against property developers, saving the countryside for the upper middle classes, a story at once timeless and contemporary.

Byatt achieves great consistency in this anthology. Here is exoticism, there is commonplace; here is privilege, there is poverty. This can be exclusionary, however. Her criterion for the English short story as "startling and satisfying" is very New Criticism and, in many ways, leads to a collection of many of the writers that one would expect to find in an Oxford anthology. Whatever reservations one might have regarding Byatt's editing, the fact is, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories is an extremely fine collection.

Her introduction, or disclaimer, that she went looking for works of art, insulates her from some criticism but exposes the entire collection to the charge that we might have read of a more diverse England if she had, for instance, provided images of Empire. While assembling this anthology, Byatt feared "being marooned amongst buffers and buffoons, bucolics, butties and Blimps". It might have been a much richer collection if she had sought refuge with those undesirables.

Oonagh Shiel is a librarian and critic