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Stet: An Editor's Life Paperback – March 12, 2002
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- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateMarch 12, 2002
- Dimensions5.49 x 0.67 x 8.24 inches
- ISBN-100802138624
- ISBN-13978-0802138620
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Product details
- Publisher : Grove Press (March 12, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0802138624
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802138620
- Item Weight : 9.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.49 x 0.67 x 8.24 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,549,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,124 in Historical British Biographies
- #2,268 in Journalist Biographies
- #8,112 in Author Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Born in 1917 and educated at Oxford University, DIANA ATHILL has written several memoirs, including "Instead of a Letter," "After a Funeral," "Somewhere Towards the End," and the New York Times Notable Book "Stet," about her fifty-year career in publishing. She lives in London and was recently appointed an Officer of the British Empire.
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Diana Athill was born in 1917 and brought up as part of the “county” set in Norfolk; she went to Oxford, and spent the war in the BBC – a job she got through a personal contact in its recruitment office; class was as powerful then as now. Disappointed in love, she fell into a series of relationships, one with a young refugee met at a party. (“He sat on the floor and sang ‘The Foggy Fogy Dew’, which was unexpected in a Hungarian.”) This was André Deutsch. The affair did not last long; the friendship, however, did and at the end of the war he asked her to join him in the publishing company he was founding. She was to work as an editor for the next 50 years, all but the last few with Deutsch himself. She says little in this book of her personal life, but she has written of that elsewhere. Stet – the word is a proofreader’s instruction, used to cancel a correction – is about Athill’s life in publishing.
The book is in two pretty much equal parts. The first is a narrative account of her career, mostly with Deutsch. The second recalls her work with a series of writers, the best-known of which are Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul; the others – Alfred Chester, Molly Keane, and one or two more – are no longer household names, if they ever were.
The first part of the book is a fascinating picture of postwar publishing in all its amateurish glory. When André Deutsch is founded in the 1950s, it works out of a converted house; books are dispatched from a packing bench that is a plank over the bath. This doesn’t surprise me; my first job, in 1974, was in publishing, and I sometimes ran the packing bench. It hadn’t changed much. But there is nothing amateur about Athill’s shrewd insight book buyers: “There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading... The second group has to be courted.” In Athill’s view, by the 1980s the second group had been seduced away by more visual media, leaving little space for literary publishing. She may have been right – then. But electronic publishing has now made books good value again, at least when sold by independents or small publishers whose overheads are low. So that second audience is being reclaimed (albeit mainly with genre books). Athill retired in the 1990s but still does the odd article and review, and one wonders what she thinks of this. She says little about technological change in general, although photosetting and on-screen page design arrived in her time.
When it comes to editing, though, Athill clearly had rigorous judgement. If a book didn’t quite work she didn’t want it, whoever had written it, and she rejected one of Philip Roth’s – a decision that caused her some pain later, but was surely right at the time. She had felt that he was writing about a different type of character than usual simply to prove that he could; and it did not ring true.
This is, in fact, the key to the second half of Stet. Athill has chosen to depict, not the writers with the highest profiles today, but those about whom she feels she has something to say. The result is a series of character sketches that do ring true, and draw you in whether you are interested in the writer or not. V.S. Naipaul is the only modern “superstar”. Of the others, I had heard of Jean Rhys and Molly Keane, but knew very little about them; I knew nothing of Alfred Chester at all. But I was fascinated. Both these, and the other, sketches suggest that Athill was not just a good editor; she was a generous friend to her writers as well. (And to Deutsch himself, who could clearly be a pain in the arse.)
Of these sketches, it is that of Jean Rhys that stands out. “No-one who has read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can suppose that she was good at life,” writes Athill, “but no-one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.” The later stages of Rhys’s life and the mess she had made of it, and her struggle with alcohol, are there – but so is her gift as a writer, and the strange early life that Athill felt explained much about her. The thumbnail sketch of V.S. Naipaul, too, is vivid, with a shrewd insight: that those whose cultural or national background is unclear must define themselves, and the personal resources needed for this can be great. They are not always there. As someone who has spent much of their life in an international milieu (in my case international development), I understand this all too well.
I am glad I read this again. Athill is, to be sure, a member of a privileged group – she uses the word caste – with an iron grip on the publishing world; but she knows that. This caste was “the mostly London-dwelling, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people [who] loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect... our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste.” She puts this in the past tense but one wonders if that caste and its prejudices have really quite gone yet. However, Athill’s judgement as an editor clearly transcends them. So does her empathetic and subtle understanding of those she met.
This is a charming book.
There are two main parts to Stet. The first section deals with Athill's own ups and downs as an editor, dealing with and catering to the eccentricities and whims of her co-workers and of the authors she dealt with. The second part consists of short tales of some of the authors with whom she worked. I had heard of Jean Rhys and have read some of V.S. Naipaul's works, so I was interested to read about them. I know nothing of Alfred Chester and Molly Keane beyond what Athill wrote about them, but it was interesting to learn about them as well.
Stet chronicles what has become a sadly repetitive story in publishing, as smaller houses like Andre Deutsch get taken over by increasingly huge mega corporations, meaning that the number of companies willing to take chances on obscure authors who nevertheless show promise grows fewer and fewer. Athill does a great service to us all in writing this memoir.
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Athill, I learn, was regarded as the best copy editor in London. Not surprising really, as she is a fine writer herself, and possessed of many skills beside her obvious intelligence, love of and engagement with fine writing and precise literary skills. She has opened my eyes to other skills an excellent editor might need - the ability to carefully steer through the minefield of the author's vulnerable ego, protective towards their work as the parent might be of a new-born baby. Empathy and diplomacy, and, something which did not strike me before, humility and a well-balanced ego, which does not get ruffled easily. A generosity of spirit to care about the writing itself, and a real love and belief in the importance of writing.
Her book is divided into two halves, firstly, her journey as a lowly paid editor and director of Andre Deutsch, from its post-war inception to its vanishing - this details much which is fascinating about the world of reading, of the way of the artist versus the way of the conglomerate, of the rise of books as mass marketed media celebrity commodities, and the mounting deluge of books good, bad and indifferent like so many varieties of same same breakfast cereals.
The second half examines in greater detail her relationship as an editor/publisher with several writers who were on Deutsch's list, V.S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, Jean Rhys, Molly Keane, Mordecai Richler and Alfred Chester.
I now want to read more of Athill's books!








