I stumbled across “Stet. An editor’s life” (Granta, 2000) in a list of recommended reading for editors published on the Reedsy Blog, an invaluable resource for authors and editorial professionals alike.
Alongside the inevitable style guides and a number of useful handbooks on the mechanical and more creative aspects of editing, there was this little gem of a memoir written by the late Diana Athill, a British editor and writer who worked with some of the greatest literary names of the 20th century over the course of nearly five decades at the now-defunct London-based publishing company André Deutsch.
The book provides a fascinating, poignant and, at times, extremely funny account of the book publishing industry in post-war Britain and, more importantly, of her relationship with some of her authors. Athill’s list included Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Alfred Chester, V.S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, and Molly Keane: all ‘remarkable people’ who, by her own account, did not necessarily become friends, but who ‘enlarged’ her life and were ‘experiences in it, in the way … that a mountain is an experience to a climber, or a river to an angler’ (I love this phrase!).
Stet also has the merit of returning to the fore backlist titles that otherwise risk getting buried under the flood of new releases. And so I was prompted to pick up Moore’s The lonely passion of Judith Hearne, reading this masterpiece of character depiction from an insider’s perspective.