The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Wordsworth Classics)
(With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin...)
With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellinton, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This addition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923. With an introduction and head-notes, this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years. Admired by Virginia Woolf in her lifetime and by many writers since her death, Katherine Mansfield is one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century.
(Bliss is a modernist short story by Katherine Mansfield f...)
Bliss is a modernist short story by Katherine Mansfield first published in 1918. It was published in the English Review in August 1918 and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories. The story follows a dinner party given by Bertha Young and her husband, Harry. The writing shows Bertha depicted as a happy soul, though quite naive about the world she lives in and those closest to her. The story opened up a lot of questions, about deceit, about knowing oneself and also about the possibility of homosexuality at the start of the 20th century. The story gives us a bird's eye view of the dinner party, which is attended by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Knight, who are close friends to Bertha and Harry. Guest, Eddie Warren, is an effeminate character, who adds an interesting mix to the party. The only other guest, Pearl Fulton, is someone who Bertha is mysteriously drawn to for reasons unknown to her at the start. The interesting thing is that Bertha's husband is presented to the reader as Bertha perceives him in her mind...
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It is Sunday and Miss Brill is sitting on her special b...)
It is Sunday and Miss Brill is sitting on her special bench in the public gardens. She likes to watch the crowd and listen to their conversations, especially now that the Season has started and the band in its rotunda is making a greater effort. Week after week she sees the same faces. There is something funny about almost all of them, she thinks
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(Linda Burnell dreams, listless and distant, whilst downst...)
Linda Burnell dreams, listless and distant, whilst downstairs her mother sets in order the familys new home in the New Zealand countryside. Her vigorous and exhausting husband, Stanley, is at the office, but will return with eager and admiring eyes. Her children prepare lunch on a concrete step and her sister sings love songs to an imaginary young man. This is The Aloe, which Katherine Mansfield wrote to crystallize the memories of her childhood. It was reworked to become her acclaimed Prelude. But the original is very different in style, detail and texture giving us a wonderful short novel in its own right. The text has been prepared by Vincent OSullivan, the renowned Mansfield scholar.
Short story writer Katherine Mansfield is noted for her short stories with themes relating to women's lives and social hierarchies as well as her sense of wit and characterizations.
Background
Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a successful merchant who eventually became one of the English colony's most prominent citizens, rising to the position of chair of the Bank of New Zealand. She once described her mother as "constantly suspicious, constantly overbearingly tyrannous, " and from an early age Mansfield seemed resentful toward her middle-class provincial family.
Education
As a teenager she was sent away to a finishing school in London that was a more intellectually rigorous institution than most girls of her class attended. There she became active in its magazine, for which she wrote several short stories, and established a lifelong friendship with classmate Ida Baker. When her schooling came to an end, Mansfield returned to her family's increasingly prosperous household in Wellington, but was determined to take leave again permanently.
Career
Enrolling in secretarial and bookkeeping courses, her parents allowed her to live abroad on her own, and in 1908 she returned to London. There she resided in a hostel for young, unmarried women pursuing artistic careers (she herself was an accomplished cellist) paid for by a stipend she received from her father until her death at age 34.
She disappeared for a time, perhaps to serve as a chorus girl in the company of the light opera troupe, but her mother soon arrived from New Zealand and took her to a spa in southern Germany. "The most widely recommended cure for girls with Kathleen's difficult complaint was a course of cold baths and wholesome exercise, " noted Antony Alpers in The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Out of her sojourn came her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, first published in 1911. The volume was noted for its rather unflattering portrayal of Germans, and "the early appeal of the collection, most said, was to the anti-German sentiments felt by Britons in the years preceding the First World War, " noted C. A. Hankin in Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories.
Moving back to London, in 1912 Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, the catalyst behind an acclaimed new English literary magazine out of Oxford called Rhythm. "Henceforth, she had a center to work from, and her early disastrous affairs, though they continued to provide a few themes for stories, sank below the horizon, " observed Ian A. Gordon in British Writers. Mansfield instead began to mine her New Zealand upbringing for subject matter, and many of these were published in Rhythm and its successor, the Blue Review.
By 1914 Mansfield and Murry were living together, and the literary journals had ceased publication; for a time he was a reviewer of French books for the Times Literary Supplement. The next year, Mansfield's younger brother stopped by London for a rare visit before joining the British Army. His death later that year in World War I resolved Katherine to further explore their childhood in colonial New Zealand for her stories. It devastated her and she produced little work for a time, and her mental anguish was compounded by her own increasingly fragile physical health. Since arriving in England as a teenager she had been plagued by illness, and by 1916 she and Murry were living in the south of France to escape its damp and chilly climate.
During these years Mansfield and Murry were becoming well-acquainted with such literary and historical figures as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bertrand Russell. Mansfield also began writing short stories for a journal called New Age. It was in the south of France that she penned her first major story, "The Aloe, " which in a revised form was published first in 1918 as "Prelude. " It "set the standard and established the pattern for all her later work, " wrote Gordon in British Writers. "Prelude" chronicles the doings of the fictional Burnell family of New Zealand, whose structure and members resemble the Beauchamps of Wellington quite distinctly. There is Stanley, the aggressive tycoon, the harsh mother Linda, the unmarried maiden aunt Beryl, and daughter Kezia, who in some of her youngest incarnations caused Joanne Trautman Banks to assert in The English Short Story that Mansfield was "one of our greatest portrayers of children in short fiction. "
In 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and began spending even more time in the south of France. This next period saw the publication of some of her most acclaimed works, including the collections Je ne parle pas francais and Bliss and Other Short Stories. Like much of her work, many of the stories feature women prominently, and often portray the few choices available to them outside of marriage. In Mansfield's era, to forsake a husband and children was almost like a death sentence.
"The success of these volumes established Mansfield as a major talent comparable to such contemporaries as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, " noted Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Now dividing her time between Switzerland, Paris, and the south of France, Mansfield wrote at a feverish pace, sometimes one story a day. They frequently appeared in publications such as the Athenaeum, the Nation, and the London Mercury. Much of what Mansfield wrote during 1920 and 1921 was published in the collection The Garden Party. Grief, like the miserable fate mapped out for most women of her class, was a strong theme in much of her work. In "The Garden Party" and other stories like "The Fly" and "Six Years After, " death and loss are predominant.
Mansfield also penned several pieces of literary criticism during her writing career and a final burst of short stories that appeared as The Dove's Nest, published the year she died. The work contains more of the fictional Burnells, and further explorations into the genre of the short story that "treat such universal concerns as family and love relationships and the everyday experiences of childhood, and are noted for their distinctive wit, psychological acuity, and perceptive characterizations, " as Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism assessed. Mansfield spent much of the last two years of her life between Italy and France, eventually staying at a priory in Fontainebleau for a holistic-type cure for her tuberculosis.
Some critics charge that Murry, while also serving as an editor of Mansfield's literary efforts, inhibited or excised some elements of her earlier work, most notably her preoccupation with a romantic attraction between women. Biographers assert that both Mansfield and Murry conducted affairs during their marriage, and that after her death of a lung hemorrhage in early 1923, her widower exploited her work, as "he profited from the publication of stories that Mansfield had rejected for publication, as well as notebook jottings, intermittent diaries, and letters, " stated Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.
Achievements
Today, there are a number of educational institutions which have a house named in her honor including, ‘Rangitoto College’, ‘Mount Roskill Grammar School’ and Westlake Girls’ High School. A number of films have also been made on her life including ‘Leave all Fair’, ‘Bliss’ and ‘A Picture of Katherine Mansfield’.
A biography by Kathleen Jones, entitled ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller’, was published in 2010.
Quotations:
"I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles. "
"Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. "
"How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life. "
"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. "
"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. "
Personality
Mansfield was attracted to both men and women.
Connections
When she was in England, at the age of nineteen, she fell in love with Garnet Trowell and became pregnant. She then rashly married her singing teacher, George Bowden and then abandoned him—all of which happened within seven months of her arrival.
She then gave birth to her baby in Germany and at the same time, she fell in love with a Polish writer, Floryan. It is believed that a possible ectopic pregnancy around this time resulted in the loss of one of her fallopian tubes and a subsequent, miscarriage.
She had numerous affairs with many men and was also believed to have been in two lesbian relationships with Maata Mahupaku and Edith Kathleen Bendall.
