The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Wordsworth Classics)

Product Information

Robinson, Roger, ed. Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Oh, she was so pleased to see him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn’t he agree? And wouldn’t he, perhaps?… According to her biography, Katherine Mansfield: A Life by Antony Alpers, “she gave early evidence of the impulsiveness, the intensity, the impatience with convention which she would pour into her later life.” After six years a woman and man meet again in a cafe. He talks about his life away from her and of shared experiences. She compares his recollections with her own. They fall into their old pattern. Woolf felt such a violent distaste for “Bliss” that, upon first reading the story in the prestigious English Review in August 1918, she threw her copy of the magazine across the room. Writing in her diary, Woolf criticized the quality of Mansfield’s writing – but it seems likely that her dislike for “Bliss” was far more personal. Mansfield met fellow student Ida Baker [4] at the college, and they became lifelong friends. [2] They both adopted their mother's maiden names for professional purposes, and Baker became known as LM or Lesley Moore, adopting the name of Lesley in honour of Mansfield's younger brother Leslie. [9] [10]In her brief life, Mansfield had a great many lovers, both male and female; her bisexuality was known to her from adolescence. Her relationship with a childhood friend, Garnet Trowell, when both were twenty, resulted in a pregnancy that she miscarried.

Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34. The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill—a something, what was it?—not sadness—no, not sadness—a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole company, would begin singing. Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, 1989, a short story collection by Witi Ihimaera

Truth viewed in terms of the conventions and assumptions of a stable civilization ceased to be regarded as truth when it became obvious that that civilization was losing its stability, when its criteria of value were ceasing to be universal, and when its conventions were coming to be viewed as irrelevant. The character Sybil in the 1932 novel But for the Grace of God, by Mansfield's friend J.W.N. Sullivan, has several resemblances to Mansfield. Musically trained, she goes to the south of France without her husband but with a female friend, and lapses into an incurable illness that kills her. [36] Harman, Claire, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (London: Vintage, 2023). Mansfield and Murry began a relationship in 1911 that culminated in their marriage in 1918, but she left him in 1911 and again in 1913. [16] The characters Gudrun and Gerald in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love are based on Mansfield and Murry. [17] Sabina works all day at the shop and café of Herr Lehmann. Frau Lehmann, his wife, is expecting a baby and nearing her delivery day. A young man comes in to the shop and pays extra attention to Sabina.