In “Mary Gresley,” the young Mary loses her father and grows up in reduced circumstances with her widowed mother, becoming engaged at seventeen to the frail curate Arthur Donne but being forced to postpone marriage because of their poverty, and hoping that her literary talent might provide an income and shorten their long wait she perseveres with fiction, improves her work under the encouragement of an editor, succeeds in having her writing published, and begins to earn money, yet Arthur disapproves of novel-writing and her growing promise as an author creates a painful conflict between personal ambition, religious obedience, and devotion to the man she loves, until the dying Arthur asks her to abandon fiction altogether and Mary faithfully promises to do so, destroys the manuscript she has been developing, and gives up the career her editor believes she might have achieved before eventually marrying a missionary and dying abroad, while the other stories collected in An Editor’s Tales broaden this tragedy into a series of encounters between an editor and aspiring or unsuccessful writers, using comic, melancholy, and sometimes devastating episodes to examine literary ambition, rejection, poverty, addiction, editorial responsibility, and the uncomfortable truth that talent, perseverance, and success do not always arrive together.
