Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories

Katherine Mansfield

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, Katherine Mansfield died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She completed the latter part of her education in London and, finding herself unable to settle back into Wellington society, left for Europe again in 1908, never to return.

Her early writings were first published in The New Age, where she became a regular contributor. Her debut book, In a German Pension, was released in 1911. In 1912, she began writing for Rhythm, a publication edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she later married.

A self-aware modernist and an experimentalist in both life and writing, Mansfield associated with other artists of her ilk, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction emerged with Prelude in 1916. By 1917, she had contracted tuberculosis, leading to a nomadic existence in pursuit of health.

Her second collection of stories, Bliss, was published in 1921, followed by The Garden Party a year later, which was the final book published during her lifetime. Two further collections of her stories, along with her Letters and later her Journal, were published posthumously.

Virginia Woolf reflected on Katherine Mansfield’s life and work: “She was for ever pursued by her dying, and had to press on through stages that should have taken years in ten minutes… She had a quality I adored and needed; I think her sharpness and reality - her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable - was the thing I wanted then. I dream of her often…”

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