Anthony Hope

Baroness Orczy

Ada Ester Leverson

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.

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?

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. 

Track Listing of Volume 7: Suggestion by Ada Ester Leverson (also known as Mrs Ernest Leverson); Young Alf. Being a Chapter from the book 'Hooligan Nights' by Clarence Rook; Foreordained by Anthony Hope;

A Successful Rehearsal by Anthony Hope; How They Stopped the 'Run' by Anthony Hope; The Bowmen by Arthur Machen; Red Tape by May Sinclair (Mary Amelia St Clair); The Monkey's Paw by W W Jacobs;

Tales of Mean Streets – Lizerunt by Arthur Morrison; The Omnibus by Arthur Quiller-Couch; A Resurrection by H B Marriott Watson; Cheating the Gallows by Israel Zangwill; An Idyl of London by Beatrice Harrenden; The Diary of a God by Barry Pain; The Love Germ by Constance Cotterell; An Immortal by Sidney Benson Thorp; A Pen-and-Ink Effect by Frances E Huntley (the writing pseudonym for Ethel Colburn Mayne); Far Above Rubies by Netta Syrett; A Melodrama - The Union by T Baron Russell; Dhoya by W B Yeats; My Honoured Master by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott; The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railroad by Baroness Orczy

Miniature Masterpiece

The Short Stories of the British Isles : Volume 7 - Ada Ester Leverson to Baroness Orczy: Some of the best stories written in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales

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