On rejection; or, If you’ve alarmed a journal editor, you must be on to something

Abstract

About two years into my doctoral studies, I had an article on Romantic literature ready for submitting to scholarly journals. I submitted it to two journals—not simultaneously (a no-no in scholarly publishing), but one after the other—and got two drastically different responses: the first was an unequivocal rejection; the next was an invitation to revise and resubmit. The first journal’s rejection letter has become one of my favourite rejection letters, but I don’t know whether I’d feel that way if the second journal hadn’t eventually accepted and published the article.