An Editor’s Tales by Anthony Trollope

Overlong tales of publishers dealing with difficult authors

An Editor’s Tales, published in 1870, is a collection of short stories by English author Anthony Trollope. The half dozen stories included here are all narrated by editors of books or literary journals. The stories deal with the publishing business and often center around the editor in question having to deal with a difficult author. For example, there’s the young author who needs nurturing (“Mary Gresley”), the pushy and arrogant author (“Josephine de Montmorenci”), the very nice but unfortunately talentless author (“The Turkish Bath”), the talented scholar with personal problems (“The Spotted Dog”), and the aggressively entitled and litigious author (“Mrs. Brumby”). Having only read a few of Trollope’s novels, I hesitate to generalize about his writing, but he has always seemed to me to be a writer of lighthearted dramedies punctuated by moments of poignancy and pathos. The stories in An Editor’s Tales are of that vein, but in this case most of the attempts at humor fall flat.

I’m guessing the stories assembled in this collection were previously published in magazines, because they don’t read as if they were intended to go together. It’s not necessarily the same editor who narrates each and every story. In all cases, the editor is unnamed, but you can tell they are different people by the publishing companies and literary journals for which they work. For a reason that’s never satisfactorily explained, Trollope has chosen to narrate these stories in the first person plural—what he calls “the editorial we”—which proves to be an annoying convention that wears on the reader’s patience before the first story is even over.

I work in book publishing (I’m not an editor, but I work with editors). The absurd situations in which the editors find themselves in these stories are unfortunately all too true. That ring of truth, however, did not enhance my enjoyment of these stories. Rather, I found the emphasis on unreasonable authors and the nuisances of the publishing industry just depressing rather than funny. “Mrs. Brumby” is a particularly ugly story in which an aggressive harpy of an author with no talent whatsoever demands that her work be published and threatens a lawsuit when her article is rejected. Trollope tries to put a funny spin on that scenario, but it just reads like an arduous ordeal. In “The Panjandrum,” a half dozen pretentious but untalented men and women of letters decide to start a literary journal, but can’t decide what sort of material they want that journal to contain. The story is entirely comprised of their tedious arguments. The fact that all of the stories in this volume are inordinately long does not help matters. More than one of these stories is as lengthy as a novella, and they all feel sluggishly padded with unnecessary filler.

The depiction of women in these stories is iffy. In Victorian England of the 1870s, opportunities for women were very limited in most endeavors. Trollope does admit, however, that literature was one discipline were women could compete with men. These stories, therefore, frequently feature women writers in an era when working female protagonists were almost nonexistent in literature. On the other hand, women are also often singled out as “the problem” in these stories. A woman’s irrational behavior is the cause of an author’s trouble or the obstacle that the editor must overcome. Any crediting of Trollope with feminist leanings for his depiction of women authors would therefore be premature. In fact, one finds little to praise or recommend in An Editor’s Tales. Trollope may be one of England’s most renowned novelists, but in this volume he demonstrates little skill in the art of the

Stories in this collection

Mary Gresley

The Turkish Bath

Josephine de Montmorenci

The Panjandrum

The Spotted Dog

Mrs. Brumby

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