The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Front Cover
Wordsworth Editions, 2006 - Fiction - 663 pages

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 Wellington, 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 edition 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.

 

Contents

Je ne Parle pas Français
44
Bliss
69
The Wind Blows
81
Pictures
92
The Man Without a Temperament
100
Mr Reginald Peacocks Day
112
Sun and Moon
120
Feuille dAlbum
126
The Doves Nest
364
Six Years After
378
Father and the Girls
388
A Bad Idea
398
Such a Sweet Old Lady
404
Susannah
410
Mr and Mrs Williams
416
Widowed
424

A Dill Pickle
132
The Little Governess
139
Revelations
151
The Escape
157
At the Bay
165
The GardenParty
197
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
211
Mr and Mrs Dove
230
The Young Girl
238
Life of Ma Parker
244
Marriage à la Mode
250
The Voyage
260
Miss Brill
268
The Wrong House
318
The Dolls House
319
Honeymoon
326
A Cup of Tea
332
Taking the Veil
339
The Canary
349
The Tiredness of Rosabel
433
The Journey to Bruges
442
New Dresses
453
The Woman at the Store
464
Ole Underwood
474
SeeSaw
540
Germans at Meat
581
The Sister of the Baroness
589
Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding
600
The Modern Soul
606
At Lehmanns
614
The Luft Bad
621
The ChildWhoWasTired
633
The Advanced Lady
640
Spring Pictures
642
The Swing of the Pendulum
649
A Blaze
659
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2006)

Katherine Mansfield was born Katherine Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand on October 14, 1888, the third daughter of a prominent banker. She attended the Wellington College for Girls before entering Queen's College in London in 1903. Her interest in the cello led to lessons at the Royal Academy of Music, where she became secretly engaged to a young prodigy named Arnold Trowell, who already had a successful concert career. Upon being summoned back to New Zealand by her father in 1906, she decided to abandon music in favor of writing. She soon had three stories published in a Melbourne monthly and gained her father's consent to return to England. Once there, she became depressed when she found that Trowell no longer loved her, and she rushed into a hasty marriage to a young musician, only to leave him a few days later. She had a miscarriage, which marked the beginning of her decline in health. After returning to England in 1910, Katherine Beauchamp published her work under the name Katherine Mansfield. A collection of her stories, "In a German Pension," was published in 1911. A year later, she met John Middleton Murry, who eventually became her second husband when she was finally able to secure a divorce. By the time of this marriage in 1918, Mansfield was found to have tuberculosis. Her ill health, combined with the death of her brother in World War I, turned the focus of her work inward and on her homeland. Her memoirs, collected in a book entitled "Bliss," secured her reputation as a writer, and she followed it up with the equally acclaimed "Garden Party and Other Stories." Her lyrical style and stream of consciousness method placed her along side James Joyce and Virginia Woolf for her strength of characterization and her subtlety of detail. Katherine Mansfield died on January 9, 1923 at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonic Development of Man at Fontainebleau.

Bibliographic information