The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Wordsworth Classics)

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Some of her most highly regarded stories include “At the Bay,” “The Voyage,” “The Stranger,” and “Daughters of the Late Colonel.” What Mansfield had in common with other modernist writers, including those who were male, is a questioning of the nature of truth and reality; a challenging of the certainties and assumptions that had underpinned Victorian fiction. The very notion of objective truth was viewed as suspect by Mansfield. As David Daiches puts it: They were all on the stage. They weren’t onl And yet it explained why she made such a point of starting from home at just the same time each week—so as not to be late for the performance—and it also explained why she had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling her English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons.

Prelude” is split into twelve short, somewhat impressionistic sections, perhaps pointing to Mansfield’s admiration of the impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, whose Sunflowers “taught me something about writing, which was queer—a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free” (see Further Reading, O’Sullivan and Scott, p. 333). It also has strong symbolic qualities, as the aloe (after which the earlier version of the story was named) exerts a fascination on Mansfield’s characters. And, by way of literary influences, the title of the story point to T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes.” O'Sullivan, "The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to K. M.," Landfall: The New Zealand Quarterly, 114 (June 1975): 95-131. De Groen, Alma (1988). The rivers of China. Sydney: Currency Press. ISBN 086819171X. OCLC 19319529. 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. C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).The 1920 collection Bliss and Other Stories (1920) followed by The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) sealed her reputation as a master of the short story form. The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories (1923) and Something Childish (1924) were published after Mansfield’s untimely death. Marvin Magalaner, The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). Mr. Sheridan: Mrs. Sheridan's husband and father of Laura, Laurie, Meg, and Jose. On the day of the party, he goes to work, but joins the party later that evening. Kavaler-Adler, Susan (1996). The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity. New York City / London: Routledge. p.113. ISBN 0-415-91412-4.

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in 1888 into a socially prominent Wellington family in Thorndon. Her grandfather Arthur Beauchamp briefly represented the Picton electorate in parliament. Her father Harold Beauchamp became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted in 1923. [2] [3] Her mother was Annie Burnell Beauchamp (née Dyer), whose brother married the daughter of Richard Seddon. Her extended family included the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, and her great-granduncle was Victorian artist Charles Robert Leslie.

Friend and rival of Virginia Woolf

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. Rosemary Fell has been married two years and is very rich. One winter afternoon she visits a little antique shop she likes. The proprietor shows her a little enamel box that’s very expensive. Outside the shop, she’s approached by a young woman asking for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees it as a opportunity for a charitable adventure. Ballantyne, Tom (15 July 1978). "Double image: defining Katherine Mansfield". The Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney, NSW, Australia. p.16 . Retrieved 5 July 2019. Mansfield with Monsters (Steam Press, 2012) Katherine Mansfield with Matt Cowens and Debbie Cowens [46] LM (1971). Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM. Michael Joseph; reprinted by Virago Press 1985. ISBN 0-86068-745-7. LM was "Lesley Morris", which was the pen name of Mansfield's friend Ida Constance Baker.

Until relatively recently, women have been noticeable only by their absence from the tradition of Anglo-American high modernism. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats – these are the names which have dominated the English modernist literary canon, with Virginia Woolf representing a token female presence.Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, Jeffrey Meyers, New Directions Pub. Corp. NY, 1978; Hamish Hamilton, London, 1978 Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even—even cupboards! Many of Mansfield’s short stories focus on those estranged or isolated by society, in particular women. Bliss is about a young woman struggling to understand her own newly discovered sexuality, Miss Brill concerns an impoverished, lonely spinster and Pictures a struggling singer who is forced to turn to prostitution . Mansfield wrote at a time when women, and some men, were questioning traditional gender roles. The movement for women’s suffrage was demanding political equality, the spread of psychoanalytical theories increasingly gave a conceptual framework to female sexuality and writers such as Mansfield, Woolf and Richardson were asserting that they had a voice which needed to be heard. Mansfield had a brief affair with the French writer Francis Carco in 1914. Her visit to him in Paris in February 1915 [8] is retold in her story " An Indiscreet Journey". [4] Impact of World War I [ edit ] Archives of Katherine Mansfield material are held in the Turnbull Collection of the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington, with other important holdings at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and the British Library in London. There are smaller holdings at New York Public Library and other public and private collections. [8] In fiction [ edit ]