The Railway Accident and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Upward, Edward

Contemporary

Penquin Books

Literary Studies, Short Stories, Collected Works

The night walk and other stories

W. Heinemann

Spine creased and faded, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

In the Thirties

Interlink Publishing+group Inc

No Home But the Struggle

Edward Upward’s acclaimed and partly autobiographical novel  printed here in a newly revised version  was originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1938. It relates the growing disillusionment of a politically-committed tutor who is attached to the household of a philistine and reactionary country gentleman. His revulsion at the behaviour of his employers and their friends leads him to the brink of madness, from which he is saved only by his resolve to contribute to the movement for social revolution. Stephen Spender, in his enthusiastic introduction, applauds Upward’s achievement, describing him as a visionary of wonderful language and extraordinary power.’

Journey to the Border (Edward Upward Series)

Literary

Enitharmon Press

These new stories give strong support to the claim that their author is one of the very few left-wing imaginative writers of literary ability who have not betrayed their principles”... Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future. We should be grateful that a devoted artist has lived so intensely through so much.  from the Introduction by Frank Kermode. The first four of these new short stories by Edward Upward, written in his nineties, form a closely linked sequence  almost a single story  and could be described as realistic dreams’. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward’s earlier fantasies The Railway Accident’ and Journey to the Border, both also published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, Fred and Lil’ is straightforwardly realistic and humanly sympathetic, while With Alan to the Fair’ deals with love, hate and political extremism in serious and in highly comical episodes.

An Unmentionable Man (Edward Upward Series)

As Cambridge undergraduates in the mid-1920s, Christopher Isherwood and his old schoolfriend Edward Upward engaged in a literary attack on the dons and the ‘poshocracy’ – the fashionable and well-heeled students – by creating the bizarre fictional world of Mortmere, a village inhabited by surreal characters modelled on their Cambridge friends and acquaintances. The rector, Casmir Welken, resembles a ‘diseased goat’ and breeds angels in the church belfry; his sidekick Ronald Gunball is a dipsomaniac and an unashamed vulgarian; Sergeant Claptree, assisted by Ensign Battersea, keeps the Skull and Trumpet Inn; the mannish Miss Belmare, domineering and well starched, is sister to the squire, and Gustave Shreeve is headmaster of Frisbald College for boys. There are engrossing accounts of the writing of the Mortmere stories in Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows and in Upward’s No Home but the Struggle, but the stories have never before been published – with the one exception of Upward’s The Railway Accident. Dr Katherine Bucknell, the editor of W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922-28 (Princeton University Press/Faber and Faber, 1994) and Isherwood’s journals, has written a fascinating introduction to the stories, and Graham Crowley’s drawings provide a lively accompaniment to them.

The Mortmere Stories (Edward Upward Series)

ISHERWOOD, Christopher

Dramas & Plays

These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward’s fiction still make a powerful impression.

The Coming Day and Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

The rediscovery of Edward Upward’s work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published The Mortmere Stories, An Unmentionable Man and a revised version of Journey to the Border. The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the Times Literary Supplement has described as Upward’s unique perfected style . . . that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'

The Scenic Railway

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