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The Best Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
These perceptive tales of frayed emotional bonds and shattering discoveries unfold in an intensely visual style of impressionistic details. Acclaimed stories by the influential Modernist author include "Prelude," a reminiscence of her New Zealand girlhood, in addition to "The Garden Party," "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped," "Bliss," and others.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 30, 1997
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About the author
Katherine Mansfield
983 books1,211 followersKathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.
Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.
Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.
Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.
Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.
Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.
Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.
Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 8, 2017
Generally speaking I am a fan of short stories. I like that the author has to deal with a short form, and so must be economical with words and narratives. A well-written short story is like a small gem, which I value highly.
My interest in Katherine Mansfield's stories was triggered by her inclusion, long after her death, in lists of important female authors, proto-feminists, in the vanguard of queer writing. Her short life was full of fascination, as she see-sawed between the London and Paris literary glitterati, her tumultuous love life and her tragic illness.
The essay on Mansfield's life at the front of this particular edition was both interesting and informative. It really helped to set the scene for some of the works included in the collection.
I must say that, overall, I was underwhelmed by Mansfield's writing. The stories seemed to me to fall into two groups - first being genuine short pieces, perhaps only 5-10 pages long, which demonstrate that facility for clever communication of ideas in an economical way. I greatly enjoyed "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" and "The Woman at the Store" (I was particularly amused by the final outcome of the latter.) I found "Bliss" and a couple of the others a little hard to get a handle on. I could not decide if the author was using satire, parody, and similar literary devices, or whether she was being straight. That's one of the problems with Mansfield for me. Born into a very wealthy family, she led a life of privilege, and was riddled with upper class values. When she denigrated the impoverished working class residents of the nearby street in "The Garden Party" was she demonstrating her prejudices, or was she being satirical? I couldn't figure it out.
Second, the real problem for me with Mansfield's collection came with the longer form stories, "Prelude" and "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais". I simply could not figure out what she was wanting to achieve, and could not get a handle on the core of the narratives. I did not finish either of them, and chose to skip the other long offering, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel". The two I tackled seemed to jump around in time, the PoV chopped and changed without warning several times. I got really confused with the character, Monsieur Raoul Duchette in "Je Ne Parle" - was this Mansfield herself cross-dressing, or some strange hybrid of masculine and feminine traits that she thought would make for a distinctive, transgender individual? I thought the dialogue, and Duchette's inner monologue were both very inconsistent and basically ineffectual. As for 'The Prelude", knowing it was some sort of representation of Mansfield's childhood did not make me want to persist with reading the twaddle it was for me.
It is always interesting to read a book from an earlier era of literature, and I don't regret taking on Mansfield's short story collection. I was not convinced and would not wish to read any more of her writings. It highlighted to me the differences between the literary world of the early 20th century in London, those darlings of the "Bloomsbury set" and others, in comparison with the much more cut-throat world of modern publishing.
3★s
My interest in Katherine Mansfield's stories was triggered by her inclusion, long after her death, in lists of important female authors, proto-feminists, in the vanguard of queer writing. Her short life was full of fascination, as she see-sawed between the London and Paris literary glitterati, her tumultuous love life and her tragic illness.
The essay on Mansfield's life at the front of this particular edition was both interesting and informative. It really helped to set the scene for some of the works included in the collection.
I must say that, overall, I was underwhelmed by Mansfield's writing. The stories seemed to me to fall into two groups - first being genuine short pieces, perhaps only 5-10 pages long, which demonstrate that facility for clever communication of ideas in an economical way. I greatly enjoyed "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" and "The Woman at the Store" (I was particularly amused by the final outcome of the latter.) I found "Bliss" and a couple of the others a little hard to get a handle on. I could not decide if the author was using satire, parody, and similar literary devices, or whether she was being straight. That's one of the problems with Mansfield for me. Born into a very wealthy family, she led a life of privilege, and was riddled with upper class values. When she denigrated the impoverished working class residents of the nearby street in "The Garden Party" was she demonstrating her prejudices, or was she being satirical? I couldn't figure it out.
Second, the real problem for me with Mansfield's collection came with the longer form stories, "Prelude" and "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais". I simply could not figure out what she was wanting to achieve, and could not get a handle on the core of the narratives. I did not finish either of them, and chose to skip the other long offering, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel". The two I tackled seemed to jump around in time, the PoV chopped and changed without warning several times. I got really confused with the character, Monsieur Raoul Duchette in "Je Ne Parle" - was this Mansfield herself cross-dressing, or some strange hybrid of masculine and feminine traits that she thought would make for a distinctive, transgender individual? I thought the dialogue, and Duchette's inner monologue were both very inconsistent and basically ineffectual. As for 'The Prelude", knowing it was some sort of representation of Mansfield's childhood did not make me want to persist with reading the twaddle it was for me.
It is always interesting to read a book from an earlier era of literature, and I don't regret taking on Mansfield's short story collection. I was not convinced and would not wish to read any more of her writings. It highlighted to me the differences between the literary world of the early 20th century in London, those darlings of the "Bloomsbury set" and others, in comparison with the much more cut-throat world of modern publishing.
3★s
April 22, 2019
Katherine Mansfield is one of those names I have heard so much about, a feminist inspiration, Sapphic icon and a hugely influential literary figure who many writers, almost all of them women rave about. I know a fair bit of her life story and so it was long overdue that I actually got round to reading her work.
The fact that the publisher (Dover) felt the need to qualify this collection with the term “Best” immediately made me suspect that they were anything but that. Either way I found this really difficult to connect with. Out of this collection I didn’t a find a single story that really did much for me, I enjoyed some elements of “The Garden Party” and my favourite was possibly the “The Fly”, but I realise that this collection may not be the best introduction to Mansfield, but I am far from an expert.
You know how when you read something that just seems so far removed from you that it almost seems to pass you by and no matter how hard you try to get into, it just won’t stick. A bit like trying to fall back asleep again after getting up in the middle of the night, the more you try the harder it becomes. I could see elements of talent shine through on occasion, but overall I found this to be a tedious and at times underwhelming experience.
February 7, 2021
3.5--I liked the short stories much more than I did a few years ago (when I first came to know of Mansfield), but I'm still not a fan. I guess it's to do with the way the stories don't sediment and settle for me: unlike Woolf, I'm not content with just seeing subjectivities and experiences acutely presented; I want to be left with something after each reading; I want the epiphany that Mansfield's characters are getting (and I am not). So I would say try Mansfield out if you're interested in seeing the intersection of modernism and realism, but I wouldn't particularly recommend.
Edit 7/2/2021: having done more secondary reading I now see that Mansfield's stories have a lot of radical potential, especially from the perspectives of feminism, psycho(sexual)analysis, and postcolonialism. She queers miniature social spaces as a means of intervening in wider instutitions and structures--and I'm coming to appreciate her more and more.
Edit 7/2/2021: having done more secondary reading I now see that Mansfield's stories have a lot of radical potential, especially from the perspectives of feminism, psycho(sexual)analysis, and postcolonialism. She queers miniature social spaces as a means of intervening in wider instutitions and structures--and I'm coming to appreciate her more and more.
April 16, 2024
The Garden Party was well worth reading, it's hard to describe the delicacy and titilating emotion in the story of a wealthy family setting up a garden party and having to deal with an unexpected death. I also enjoyed the bittersweet encounter between a young couple in Mr and Mrs Dove. The Life of Ma Parker was somewhat depressing but moving and I thought all the stories I read were brilliantly observed but I'm not sure they would appeal to everyone as they are rather dated.
January 22, 2022
I had to read this for a book club as its not my usual reading material.
The stories are much easier to digest and to appreciate if you know about the author and what her style and purpose was; before that, I had struggled to enjoy or understand the point of some the stories.
An enjoyable foray into new territory but not something I would readily return to.
The stories are much easier to digest and to appreciate if you know about the author and what her style and purpose was; before that, I had struggled to enjoy or understand the point of some the stories.
An enjoyable foray into new territory but not something I would readily return to.
March 15, 2018
Visiting New Zealand and husband bought this book for me. Always interesting to read a writer with whom I am unfamiliar, but disappointed in these dated and ambiguous stories.
April 12, 2024
This was just not for me. I listened to the CD version, which is not listed here. The story lines are slow and few of them retained relevance since this was written.
August 17, 2022
i love bliss and je ne parle pas francais <3
July 8, 2013
Conocí a Katherine Mansfield cuando leí un libro con los cuentos favoritos de Cortázar. Ahí venía 'Bliss', una chulada de cuento precioso y desgarrador que me llevó a buscar más de esta Neozelandesa (¿Así se escribe?). Error, sólo me aburrí monstruosamente. Esta autora tiene voz de niña popis, chiflada, mensa, frívola... no sé, se me figura algo así como la Guadalupe Loaeza de Nueva Zelanda. Compré este libro en inglés y otro en español (con cuentos distintos) convencida de que comenzaría una bonita obsesión con Mansfield, pero no. Veré si luego me dan ganas de darle otra oportunidad a Doña Cata, esta vez en español.
P.D. Pero busquen 'Bliss' en internet, al menos, vale muchísimo.
P.D. Pero busquen 'Bliss' en internet, al menos, vale muchísimo.
March 15, 2011
I read a fair few of these short stories, but this collection was simply too enormous, and I had to return it to the library. I enjoyed them, but didn't have any grand thoughts on them.
October 26, 2016
Always interesting to read things years later with a different perspective on life, the last time I read any Mansfield I was at high school!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews