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.

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 8: The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling; Second Thoughts by Arthur Moore; The Haunted Orchard by Richard Le Gallienne; The Lizard by C J Cutcliffe Hyne; The Ides of March by E W Hornung; All Soul's Eve by Dora Sigerson Shorter; The Crystal Egg by H G Wells; Jezebel of Valley Farm by Edward Phillips Oppenheim; Two or Three Witnesses by C E Montague; The Crimson Weaver by R Murray Gilchrist; The Matador of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett; Caterpillars by E F Benson; Apple Blossom in Brittany by Ernest Dowson; The Salvation of a Forsythe by John Galsworthy;

The Coin of Dionysius by Ernest Bramah

© 2020 Miniature Masterpiece (Rafbók): 9781839676864

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Rafbók: 11 november 2020