The ‘wire-puller’: L. T. Meade, Atalanta and the Development of the Short Story

Abstract

Through a consideration of her career as both editor of Atalanta and a short story author regularly featured in the pages of numerous periodicals including the Strand, this chapter explores and assesses L. T. Meade’s position as both a promoter and innovator of the short story form in the period of its rise to popular prominence. The chapter argues that, by regularly featuring short complete works of fiction in Atalanta and through her methods of encouraging, inspiring and challenging her girl readers (who included Virginia Woolf, Evelyn J. Sharp and Angela Brazil) to become writers and modernisers of short fiction themselves, Meade was among the earliest and most important advocates of the female-authored short story as a potentially ground-breaking and inventive fictional genre.