Introduction

KM’s brief correspondence with the editor and publisher Clement King Shorter dates from the final years of her life, when she began contributing short stories to The Sphere. Shorter established the popular illustrated paper in 1900 and edited it until his death in 1926. In total, KM published seven stories in The Sphere in 1921 and planned to produce a twelve-part serial in 1922 (which ultimately failed to come to fruition). In a letter to Ottoline Morrell, she acknowledged that her motivation in writing for The Sphere was primarily financial, noting that ‘it pays better than any other paper I know’ (24 July 1921 – see above, pp. 291–2). Nevertheless, she also wrote of her appreciation for the audience that she gained as a result of the association, telling Dorothy Brett that she derived ‘the greatest pleasure’ from the receipt of letters from readers and ‘value[d] [them] far more than any review’ (30 March 1922, CL1, p. 459). At this stage of her career, KM actively courted wider networks for the publication of her work in a diverse variety of magazines and periodicals, expanding her readership beyond the relatively small circulation of the little magazines and literary papers with which she had previously been associated. Her correspondence with Clement Shorter helps to locate KM’s writing within the broader publishing networks of the early twentieth century. This is further apparent in similar letters to her agents, J. B. and Eric Pinker, in which KM discusses the American and serial rights for stories, including those published in The Sphere (13 September 1921 and 30 March 1922, respectively – see above, pp. 451 and 439).

Over the course of his career, Clement Shorter was closely linked with a range of popular illustrated papers, including the Illustrated London News, of which he was editor between 1891 and 1900. In addition to founding The Sphere and contributing a weekly ‘Literary Letter’ throughout his editorship of the paper, he established magazines such as the Sketch in 1893 and the Tatler in 1901. He was also a prolific publisher and, as J. M. Bulloch notes in his edition of Shorter’s (unfinished) autobiography, ‘between 1889 and 1926, C.K.S. wrote, edited, prefaced, and privately printed more than a hundred books and booklets’.