Katherine Mansfield was one of the most famous and celebrated short fiction writers of the early 20th century. In her brief life – she died of tuberculosis at thirty-four – she produced dozens of short stories and poems, the first two full volumes of which are presented here as they originally appeared in print.
These two collections: ’Bliss, and Other Stories’ from 1920 and ‘The Garden Party, and Other Stories’ from 1922 – were enormously popular when they were first published and her works have gone on to be revered by critics and readers alike, often numbered among the finest pieces of short fiction ever written.
About the author
Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield in New Zealand in 1888 and raised in a suburb of Wellington called Thorndon. A writer from an early age, Mansfield drew inspiration from her lover and muse – a Maori tribal leader Maata Mahupuku – and moved to the UK when she was nineteen to go to Queen’s College with her sisters. Though she loved writing, Mansfield’s original plan was to become a professional cellist, but her work on the college newspaper and her voracious appetite for reading eventually pulled her towards a career in literature. Though she continued to have relationships with men throughout her life – eventually marrying twice – Mansfield also had relationships with at least two women, Mahupuku and artist Edith Kathleen Bendall. Mansfield worked exclusively in short fiction, producing dozens of stories and poems during her brief life. She was a great admirer of Anton Chekhov and used one of his quotes to lead off her book ‘Something Childish’: A little bird was asked: Why are your songs so short? He replied: I have many songs to sing, and I should like to sing them all. Mansfield became close friends with both Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. (The lead characters in Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ are based on Mansfield and her second husband, John Middleton Murry.) Woolf once said of Mansfield: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I was ever jealous of.’ A tireless writer, Mansfield continued to publish short stories and poems in various journals and magazines, her pace hardly slackening even after she learned that she had contracted tuberculosis in 1917. Though she desperately sought to cure herself of the disease, she eventually succumbed in 1922 and died at thirty-four. One of the most revered short story writers of the early 20th century, Katherine Mansfield is a national literary hero in New Zealand and her works have been published in dozens of languages.
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