Horizon

Horizon was a British literary magazine founded in 1939 by Cyril Connolly, and it played a decisive role in Briony Tallis's artistic and moral reckoning. The magazine's rejection of her novella Two Figures by a Fountain in 1940 forced her to confront the evasions of her writing and the guilt she had tried to conceal behind modernist technique. The letter from Connolly, which she received after a harrowing night of nursing casualties from Dunkirk, became a catalyst for her lifelong attempt at atonement through fiction.

Founding and Character

Horizon was established in 1939, at the outset of the Second World War, and quickly became a prominent venue for new writing. Its editor, Cyril Connolly, was known for his sharp critical judgment and his belief that artists should not be compelled to engage directly with political events. In a letter to Briony, Connolly articulated the magazine's position: "We do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise and right to ignore it and devote themselves to other subjects." This stance, which Connolly elaborated in a relevant editorial he promised to send, reflected Horizon's commitment to aesthetic and psychological exploration over immediate political commentary. The magazine's offices were located at Lansdowne Terrace in Bloomsbury, where Briony personally delivered her typescript to a pleasant young woman who came to the door.

Briony's Submission and Rejection

In early 1940, during her week of holiday after preliminary nursing training, Briony borrowed her uncle's typewriter and spent more than eight hours a day for a week typing out her novella, Two Figures by a Fountain. The completed manuscript ran to one hundred and three pages. She kept a carbon copy for herself, wrapped the original in brown paper, and took the bus to Bloomsbury to deliver it to Horizon's office. Three months passed without any response. The rejection letter, when it finally arrived, was unusually long and detailed—Connolly noted that Horizon's letters of rejection were "usually no more than three sentences long." The letter praised some of Briony's images, such as "the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer," and acknowledged that the magazine's readers had found the work "arresting enough to read with dedicated attention." However, Connolly criticized the novella for owing "a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf" and for lacking "an underlying pull of simple narrative." He suggested that Briony had "thrown the baby of fictional technique out with the folktale water" and urged her to create "some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself." The letter also noted that one of the magazine's avid readers was Elizabeth Bowen, who had picked up the typescript and finished it that afternoon, initially finding the prose "too full, too cloying" but eventually becoming "hooked for a while." Connolly concluded by inviting Briony to submit short stories in the future and offered to discuss her work further over a glass of wine.

Significance for Briony's Development

The rejection from Horizon became a mirror for Briony's moral failings. She recognized that the evasions of her novella were "exactly those of her life"—she had hidden behind "borrowed notions of modern writing" and drowned her guilt in a stream of consciousness. The letter's question—"Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion?"—struck her as a direct indictment of her role in Robbie Turner's wrongful imprisonment. She realized that what she lacked was not "the backbone of a story" but "backbone" itself. The rejection thus marked a turning point: it forced her to acknowledge that her artistic choices were also ethical choices, and that true atonement would require confronting the truth rather than obscuring it in aesthetic experimentation. Decades later, as she completed her final novel in 1999, Briony reflected that her "fifty-nine-year assignment" had been to describe the crime she had committed, and that the various drafts of her work—from the earliest version in January 1940 to the latest in March 1999—represented her ongoing struggle to achieve atonement through fiction. The Horizon rejection, with its call for narrative backbone, had set her on that path.