The period 1890–1915 saw not only the rise and first flowering of the British short story but also the emergence of the Modernist movement, that elusive and difficult to define but crucially important era that has been variously dated as extending from 1890 to 1930, 1890 to 1945, 1915 to 1965. I will not attempt here what others have devoted books to examining, namely, a full discussion of the literary figures and characteristics that constitute Modernism, but as the short story was undeniably a part of the literature that is included in the movement, there is no avoiding some discussion of how the phenomena discussed so far mesh or contrast with what literary critics and historians typically regard as the important works and figures of the period.

In his attempt to grapple with the difficulties associated with Modernism and especially its British incarnation, Malcolm Bradbury makes a particularly useful point for this discussion. Commenting on the international aspect of Modernism and Britain's place in it, Bradbury remarks,

The point I would stress from Bradbury's observation is the idea that the ‘English tradition … never fully assimilated Modernism at all’, a point that strikes me as particularly relevant to the development of the British short story. Undeniably, the British short story saw its fair share of canonical Modernist masterpieces, notably those by Conrad, Joyce, Mansfield, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, but judged against the background of the short story as a whole from 1890 on, these high Modernist writers and their stylistic and formal experiments would be seen as the exception rather than the rule.