The short story in Britain today: enough to make Conan Doyle weep

I am not sure if it’s properly understood quite what a crisis the short story is now in. Superficial signs of success and publicity — such as Alice Munro winning the Nobel, or the establishment of another well-funded prize — are widely mistaken for a resurgence. But what has disappeared — and disappeared quite recently — is the wide spread of journals willing to pay for a single story.

That is what sustained the genre in its glory days. Edwardian magazines such as the Strand happily paid their star writers the equivalent (or even more) of a doctor’s annual income for a single story. There were dozens of such publications between 1890 and the outbreak of the first world war. The result was a golden age of the story, as writers saw that it was worth their while to dedicate a significant part of their practice to the short form.

As recently as the 1980s there were still a good number of journals in this country regularly publishing short fiction and developing individual talent.