Citation:
Date Published:
5 January 2023Abstract:
The publication in 1928 of W. Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories Ashenden, or the British Agent set a new standard for espionage fiction. Based on the author’s own experience in intelligence work during World War I, three Ashenden stories discussed here, “Miss King,” “The Traitor,” and “Mr. Harrington’s Washing,” portray, in different ways, the pressures that history and ideological conflict place upon individuals and their relationships. Ashenden himself becomes subject to doubt, and often ends his mission in failure or at most an ambiguous victory. As one of the earliest protagonists of the modern espionage narrative, Maugham’s “British Agent” represents not only his nation at war but also the sense that that nation’s power and influence on the world stage are beginning to slip away.
September 2022: Martin Griffin is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His publications include Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900 (U. of Mass. Press 2009), Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (with Constance DeVereaux, Ashgate, 2013), and an edited collection on the interactions of American literature and US political history, Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience (with Christopher Hebert, U. of Tenn. Press, 2017). He is currently completing a book-length study entitled Reading Espionage Fiction: Narrative, Conflict, and Commitment from WW1 to the Contemporary Era.