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Stet: An Editor's Life Paperback – March 12, 2002

4.3 out of 5 stars 264

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Diana Athill's Stet is "a beautifully written, hardheaded, and generally insightful look back at the heyday of postwar London publishing by a woman who was at its center for nearly half a century" (The Washington Times). A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andre Deutsch, Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books. Stet is a must-read for the literarily curious, who will revel in Athill's portraits of such great literary figures as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and others. Spiced with candid observations about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers (and the idiosyncrasies of both), Stet is an invaluable contribution to the literature of literature, and in the words of the Sunday Telegraph, "all would-be authors and editors should have a copy." "Wryly humorous ... notable for its extraordinary lucidity...." -- The New York Times Book Review "A beguiling tonic to book business sob stories... Stet can barely contain Athill's charm and great big heart." -- Newsday "In addition to telling a good story, Athill writes profoundly about how she is affected by the books she loves." -- The Boston Globe

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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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 264

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Diana Athill
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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.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
264 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2015
I was somewhat nonplussed when I first read this, four or five years ago; I was irritated by Athill’s privileged background and was disappointed that she highlighted authors I had not read and, in several cases, had never heard of. But I sensed I was missing something. Rereading the book after several years, I see that I was.

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.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2016
I admire Ms Athill's approach to life and to writing. This is the third book of hers that I have read and enjoyed. I will say that I was surprised at how distressing much of her life in publishing seems to have been, but maybe I'm misinterpreting.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2019
If you like books about the publishing industry, you will love Diana Athill's take on it from her perspective -- post WWII in London, when starting a publishing company -- in this case the Andre Deutsch company - was just a matter of a little capital and getting your books reviewed in the newspaper. Athill worked for the BBC during the war, and afterwards followed Andre Deutsch the man through his several incarnations of companies. She takes you through the next 50 years of it until the inevitable changes came (especially mergers that created mega companies, swallowing up or pushing out the independents) and she was retirement age anyway. She also touches on the role (fate!) of women in publishing, but portrays herself as the genteel type who never, or rarely, pushed back. She was apparently the consummate editor -- not the type who cleans up the commas and typos, she makes clear -- but the type who held the hand of many writers as they went through the agonies of getting their manuscripts finished. Her company published some of the giants (Updike, Cheever, Kerouac), but she gets into detail about just a few. In particular, her account of Jean Rhys was compelling. I had read Rhys's "A Wide Sargasso Sea" many years ago and found it a little unsatisfying. However, had I known of Rhys's background of growing up in the Dominican Republic when it was little more than a plantation island, it would have been more meaningful to me. Athill explains it all, along with her dealings with several other difficult artists, some of whose books would disappear into the pages of history. Athill's writing style is somewhere between conversational and highly literate. I felt as if I were sitting with her over tea while she dished it out, in a very genteel manner, of course.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2012
I like cleverness and Diana is very clever, I actually asked to quote her in my own book. She captures a,world of the past, the old publishing world BC (before computer publishing) together with more intimate biography. I got cross with her passivity over money and office space, but all that adds to enjoying a book.
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2024
Diana Athill is a formidable writer. I intend to read ALL her 7 books. What a delight to read and re-read her sentences.
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2019
Diana Athill was once well known as "the best editor in London." For nearly forty years she was a vital part of Andre Deutsch publishing, an idiosyncratic but high quality company that specialized in discovering new authors or in reviving others who had lapsed into obscurity. Stet is a memoir of her life at Andre Deutsch from the immediate post World War II era until it was finally sold and absorbed into a larger firm in 1985.

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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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2018
Interesting but not particularly enjoyable because most of the people involved were unpleasant individuals.

Top reviews from other countries

Sandra Flagler
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Read
Reviewed in Canada on March 11, 2019
A joy to read this lovely little book by Diana Athill.
One person found this helpful
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Trisha
5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read
Reviewed in India on July 20, 2020
This is a must read for publishers, editors, designers, authors, reviewers, bloggers, distributors, and every bibliophile alive.
Manina
5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging account of English language publishing.
Reviewed in Australia on April 8, 2019
Fabulous book. A fantastic and very engaging account of English language publishing. A most interesting biography of the work life of a woman in the mid twentieth century. A great reminder of books and authors I have not thought about for a long while or did not know at all. I have compiled a list of must reads that will keep me busy for the rest of the year.
Lady Fancifull
5.0 out of 5 stars Journeys with literary lions, armed with a red pen
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 11, 2012
This was a surprisingly fascinating and enjoyable read. Surprising, because I wouldn't necessarily have thought 'I can't wait to find out about the world of publishing' Nevertheless, Athill illustrates my belief that it is possible to find anything in this world fascinating, providing one has the right teacher/companion to make the learner/listener/reader look at things in a different way. Passion, enthusiasm and the desire to share the enjoyment of whatever-it-is are profoundly catching.

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!
9 people found this helpful
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Jean Fraser
4.0 out of 5 stars A promiscuous world dominated by irrational men.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2021
It seems so long ago, that subservient female behaviour in businesses owned by men, yet Diana Athill's memoir is about people we have heard of and people who are still alive. Publishing in London in the second half of the twentieth century was at first an uphill struggle to escape the post war slump. Andre Deutsch Ltd camped in cheap lodgings where they sent out books from a table which was a board over the bath tub. They ended up as publishers to some of the best literature of the past decades. Athill's memoir is a thrilling account of people and books, lives and loves in London through the 60s to the nineties.
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