The best British short stories of 1922 — Story, Setting & Ideas

Memory as a Battleground

The excerpt from the unnamed story (attributed to Stacy Aumonier in the contents) stages a confrontation between a living man and a dead rival. The living man tells Olive that her deceased fiancé, Carruthers, was 'no better than other men' and had stayed at a hotel with another woman. He frames his revelation as an act of liberation: 'It is wrong that you should sacrifice your life to a memory.' Yet Olive's response undercuts his moral certainty. She reveals she was the woman with Carruthers, and her love persists despite full knowledge. The story thus refuses a simple dichotomy between illusion and truth. Memory is not shattered by facts; it absorbs them. The man's attempt to 'strive with a memory' fails because Olive's memory is not an idol but a conscious choice. The closing image—'the faint noise of the water and the wistful wind'—leaves the tension unresolved, suggesting that some memories withstand even the most damaging evidence.

The Reluctant Vagrant

Rowland Kenney's 'A Girl in It' introduces Black Mick, a man who 'liked work' yet cannot hold a job. The narrator observes that 'jobs refused to hold him, and the road gripped him in spite of himself.' This paradox—a worker who cannot settle—creates a different kind of tension: between identity and circumstance. Mick's 'respectability was uncanny'; he discusses begging and stealing as abstract moral problems, not personal options. The story seems to explore how external forces (the economy, the road) override internal desires. The narrator's aside—'to me there was a real—but let that go'—hints at a personal stake, perhaps a similar struggle. The excerpt does not reveal the titular 'girl,' but the title suggests that romantic or social ties may further complicate Mick's relationship with work and stability. The story appears to examine how people become trapped between what they want and what their environment allows.

Editors and Their Aims

The front matter reveals the editors' ambitions. O'Brien and Cournos thank numerous periodicals—The Saturday Evening Post, The Dial, The Freeman, The English Review, and others—indicating a wide net cast for stories. They invite submissions of 'stories printed during the year beginning July 1, 1922, which have qualities of distinction.' This annual volume aims to curate a national short-story output, and the list of contributors includes established names (John Galsworthy, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood) alongside less familiar ones. The editors' address in Oxfordshire and their request for corrections suggest a hands-on, evolving project. The inclusion of a story from The New Age (Kenney's) alongside more commercial magazines points to a catholic taste. Readers should note that the editors' definition of 'best' likely reflects early-1920s literary values: psychological realism, moral ambiguity, and a preference for understated epiphanies over melodrama.

War's Lingering Shadow

Though only one excerpt directly addresses World War I, its presence is felt. The dead Carruthers 'slept in the now silent Salient where a little cross marked his bed.' The living man shared Carruthers' risks but returned; his rivalry with a ghost is framed as 'not fair.' The war creates a surplus of memories that compete with the living. Olive's fidelity to a dead man is called 'morbid' and 'unnatural,' yet the story does not endorse that judgment. Instead, it shows how war distorts normal romantic competition: the living man cannot win because the dead cannot be outdone. The anthology's publication in 1922 places it just four years after the Armistice, and readers may find other stories grappling with similar aftermaths. The tension between moving on and honoring the dead—central to the excerpt—likely echoes through the volume.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the spaces between dramatic events: the pauses, the silences, the things left unsaid. The excerpts reward attention to voice and rhythm—the clipped dialogue in the Aumonier story, the colloquial ease of Kenney's narrator. The editors have gathered stories that often resist neat resolutions, preferring instead to leave characters suspended in moral or emotional ambiguity. This is a volume for those who value craft over closure, and who find tension in what a story refuses to resolve.

There’s a particular ache in those 1922 stories—how memory warps the streets we once knew. I found myself thinking of that again while revisiting the old Russian masters, their wandering souls and half-finished gestures. It’s a quieter kinship, a shared breath between two very different landscapes. Somewhere between Wych Street and a snowy provincial yard, the same loneliness hums. Best Russian Short Stories — Reading Companion stays on my shelf for that very reason, like a familiar photograph slipped into an unfamiliar book.