Charles Dickens

Sheridan Le Fanu

Mary Diana Dods

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 2: The Prediction by Mary Diana Dods (who wrote as David Lyndsey); South West & by West Three Quarters by West Frederick Marryat; The Vampyre. A Tale by John William Polidori; The Indian Orphan by Letitia Elizabeth Landon; The First Evening by Catherine Crowe; The Botathen Ghost by Reverend R S Hawker; The Sexton's Hero by Elizabeth Gaskell; A Little Dinner At Timmin's by William Makepeace Thackeray; The Trial for Murder by Charles Dickens; The Baron of Grogzwig by Charles Dickens; The Lake Pibble Pobble by Edward Lear; Reality or Delusion by Mrs Ellen Wood (aka Mrs Henry Wood); Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by Sheridan Le Fanu

Miniature Masterpiece

The Short Stories of the British Isles : Volume 2 - Mary Ann Dods to Sheridan Le Fanu: Some of the best stories written in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales