Late Modernist Debuts: Publishing and Professionalizing Young Novelists in 1920s Britain

In "Literature as a Profession," a 1913 editorial in the Times, an unprecedented surge of aspiring young writers was met with the strongest discouragement: "There are now more youths than ever eager to be writers. There are more, indeed, than the public could possibly read, even if it regarded reading as a sacred duty; and it can only protect itself against their importunities by a dazed indifference like that of harassed tourists in the East."¹

The imperial imagery—young writers were compared to colonial beggars, distracting the good people of England from the real sights they wanted to see—revealed the Times's strong feelings on the matter. A man with an imperial connection of his own, Edward Bell (his publishing house's Indian and Colonial Library sold nearly 1.5 million books between 1894 and 1911), was equally emphatic in his rejection of young authors.² He had edited Chatterton's poetical works early in his publishing career, but in March 1914, when he heard of a proposal to turn the Author's Union magazine into a platform for young writers, he did no more than quote Punch: "Don't."³

The assumption behind these rejections was that young writers lacked the experience to write anything worth reading. Yet in 1915, no doubt because "our boys" were suffering in the trenches, youth was given a chance in Nisbet's Writers of the Day series, whose guiding idea was to have young authors assess their established elders. Its first two books, on Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, were authored by men aged thirty-seven and forty-two, both of whom had already published a number of books. Clearly youth in publishing is relative, as J. B. Priestley observed in a 1925 article, "The Younger Novelists": the term is used for individuals who "are not young men, but, for the most part, men in their forties."⁴ In a way, Priestley was right. Although it is difficult to find comprehensive data, and there is none specific to the novel, for the American market, in 1940, 20.0 percent of women and 31.0 percent of men were in the age group twenty-three to thirty at the time of their debut, while in 1955, only 15.6 percent of writers made their debut before thirty-one years of age.⁵ Bernard Lahire's La Condition littéraire notes that in contemporary France, the average age for a debut author is forty-one years.⁶

But in a more crucial sense, Priestley was wrong by the standards of 1925, when he was thirty. It is startling how many young novelists were published in 1920s Britain, in a trying economic climate for the book industry.⁷ Evelyn Waugh, whose brother Alec was a best-selling wunderkind with The Loom of Youth (1917), observed at the start of the decade that "the very young have gained an almost complete monopoly of book, press and picture gallery. Youth is coming into its own."⁸ When Ronald Firbank in 1925 discovered a novel he had written when he was ten, he related his pride in having had "the tact as a child not to rush headlong into print."⁹ While he was probably thinking of Daisy Ashford, whose The Young Visiters (1919) sold over 230,000 copies in two years, netting its author £3,600 in royalties, there were many other young authors around.¹⁰ For the period 1920 to 1933, the list of British novelists whose debut occurred when they were twenty-five years or younger is staggering: Harold Acton, Michael Arlen, H. E. Bates, Barbara Cartland, Leslie Charteris, Noël Coward, Daphne du Maurier, Pamela Frankau, Louis Golding, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Georgette Heyer, James Hilton, R. C. Hutchinson, Christopher Isherwood, Malcolm Lowry, Ethel Mannin, Beverley Nichols, Mary Panter-Downes, William Plomer, Goronwy Rees, Edward Sackville-West, and Evelyn Waugh.

While a survey of literary history shows that there are always cases of young authors getting published, the 1920s was different because of the institutional apparatus encouraging the process. Publishers targeted and advertised...