MORE anthologies have been published in this decade than ever before, and even if we accept that ours is the age of anthologies, questions regarding the reasons for their success still arise.
In this new anthology, Kate Flint has selected 32 short stories which collectively illustrate that "what is peculiar to the Victorian decades is that new understandings about how relationships might be conducted and represented were developing alongside the emerging genre of the short story: experimentalism, new definitions, new patterns, a refutal of preestablished plots are, by the end of the period, common to both fiction and social forms".
Flint concludes her introduction with the yawnsome platitude that the binding force between her selected stories is that "love is something defined within the terms of a relationship, not something which obeys any external laws or labellings". As in the majority of modern anthologies, however, the editor presumes the reader to be something of a mental deficient and incapable of making or recognising such an obvious connection.
Earlier in her introduction, Flint is conspicuously more concerned with the sociological ramifications of the Victorian love story than she is with the "emerging genre of the short story". Focusing on these stories which stress double standards and women's negotiations for independence, Flint argues that when Victorians wrote of love they were "almost always offering some kind of reflection on the position of women within society", and she claims that the alleged agency of these women characters was invariably measured by "the opportunities available to [them] within [their] given class and culture, and the demands of the genre itself".
In itself, this is a just argument, but Flint rarely makes specific references to "the demands" of the short story genre. She never mentions Poe, for instance, who in the 1840s delineated the first "poetics" for the modern short story. Nor does she delve into the singularity of effect, or the revelation of character, which have long been the hallmarks of the short story. She does, however, mention in passing the complex mirroring and reflective response which the best short stories (those of Flannery O'Connor, as much as Anthony Trollope's, Thomas Hardy's, Ernest Dowson's and Ella D'Arcy's) have been capable of provoking in the Victorian, as well as the modern reader.
While Flint's introduction reads much like a Victorian love story itself, with a heavy reliance on qualitative adverbs and adjectives and seemingly endless sentences, some of the stories she has selected stand out for their uniqueness and memorable qualities. William Morris's "Frank's Sealed Letter", for example, portrays the male as being pathetically more vulnerable in love than the female, and reads rather like the fabric patterns for which he is better known. Ella D'Arcy's "The Pleasure Pilgrim" is also a delightful discovery for me, as is Ernest Dowson's "The Statute of Limitations".
Love, in Flint's anthology, has a narrow definition, for she discounts stories having to do with child parent love, love of place, incestuous, homosexual, or lesbian love (as portrayed, for example, by Le Fanu), and any other sort of mawkish" love. Even so, many of her authors cast a jaundiced eye on the most conservative heterosexual love story. Ellen T. Fowler, in "An Old Wife's Tale", for example, observes that "we have more love stories than we used to have, but bless love; just as we have more dentists than we used to have, but fewer teeth".
Flint, like most modern anthologists (or "flower collectors" - from the Greek), will be appealing to readers who are either too lazy or too busy pursuing the almighty punt and the dung of the dollar world to read texts in their entirety and to make connections between texts for themselves. While Flint's is not the best of late 20th century anthologies, neither is it the worst. Middle of the road, its days will be numbered, as will (with any luck) the days of the anthology in general.
