If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

Intriguing and beautiful, 16 Nov 2007
I am new to Mansfield's work (shameful, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short stories. The selection in this book is broad and vary in length, subject and even style. Mansfield's prose is created with pained consideration to every word - the characters and atmosphere are developed within a short timeframe and hence every word counts for much. Her stories are what I would call 'easy reads' (i.e. not complex sentences or crammed with unusual words) but there is certainly more to each story than meets the eye. They are thought-provoking and it is just as relevant to consider what is NOT said than what is. It would be impossible - and it certainly wouldn't do justice - to summarise Mansfield's stories in this review. The beauty is in the individual interpretation of her work as well as the lingering pleasure derived from every sentence.

I bought this as part of a literature course I was studying but, unlike some of the texts, I'll keep this gem on my bookshelf for future reading pleasure.

Rich, subtle and humanistic , 29 Oct 2007
K Mansfield is an author that I really love and admire. I studied her writings at university, and rediscovered her "Selected Stories" recently with great pleasure and awe. Her style is fantastic ; her short stories focus on the characters' inner states and her depiction of human psychology is so accurate, rich and subtle. My favourites stories are Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, the Garden Party, Mr and Mrs Dove,... The poignant "Life of Ma Parker" as well as the human cruelty depicted in "Ms Brill" will make your heart bleed. An author highly recommended.

highly recommended, 04 Feb 2007
Katherine Mansfield's quietly devastating prose and absolute commitment to craft remain two of the most potent twentieth century contributions to the difficult genre of the short story. This well-chosen selection demonstrates why.

Rich in colour, atmosphere and poetry, these tales most frequently turn on questions of loss and self-realization. Mansfield often takes as her subjects the resonant emptiness of lives framed by the tightest of parameters - a lonely woman's complete attachment and identification with her canary, a man's dependence on the memory of his dead son - and times where cherished certainties fall away in moments of revelation.

Perhaps the most famous of the latter type is 'Bliss' where the abrupt emptying of juvenile hostess Bertha Mason's boundless, yet ultimately restricting, exhiliration comes as an ambiguous opportunity for both delayed misery and growth. Elsewhere, tiny phrases in conversation unravel inescapable disparities in relationships; the complex emotional tensions of Mansfield's characters lie, as in Chekhov, primarily beneath the glittering surface of her clipped and confident style.

Intricately crafted, the nuanced dimensions of these stories haunt the reader, echoing in your mind long after you've put the book down. I find them compulsively re-readable.

This selection contains all of Mansfield's most famous tales including 'Bliss', 'The Canary', 'The Fly', 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'A Dill Pickle', 'A Cup of Tea' and a recently available, unedited version of 'Je Ne Parle Pas Francais' which restores the full depth of its narrator's deliciously depraved senses of self and sensuality. A must-read.

Good, 20 Sep 2001
I enjoyed her style, her vocabulary and such plot lines as in the two strangers with an odd childish relationship in "Something childish but very natural" and one woman's journey into an occupied area of France in "An indiscreet Journey."

Very enjoyable and thoroughly satisfying!!

Elegantly crafted stories which capture the imagination, 19 Sep 2001
With her abundant usage of simile and metaphor, her sensibility and her presentation of the senses, colour, shape and aesthetic and moral perception, the indescribable style of Katherine Mansfield is present within this collection of short stories. Taken from Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), these stories are set in many places and at many times, being linked together by Mansfield's delight in beauty and the essence of life, and her slight disgust at the crude and the ugly. Mansfield's ability to create such acute pictures within the reader's mind, to veritably sweep the reader into the narrative with her descriptive language, can only be achieved through her masterful skill of crafting language. This collection is wonderful - if you have ever felt slightly disconnected from the world around you, that you have thoughts which others do not, then this collection is for you - relish the similies, melt into the metaphors and let Mansfield take you on her magic carpet ride.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

Intriguing and beautiful, 16 Nov 2007
I am new to Mansfield's work (shameful, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short stories. The selection in this book is broad and vary in length, subject and even style. Mansfield's prose is created with pained consideration to every word - the characters and atmosphere are developed within a short timeframe and hence every word counts for much. Her stories are what I would call 'easy reads' (i.e. not complex sentences or crammed with unusual words) but there is certainly more to each story than meets the eye. They are thought-provoking and it is just as relevant to consider what is NOT said than what is. It would be impossible - and it certainly wouldn't do justice - to summarise Mansfield's stories in this review. The beauty is in the individual interpretation of her work as well as the lingering pleasure derived from every sentence.

I bought this as part of a literature course I was studying but, unlike some of the texts, I'll keep this gem on my bookshelf for future reading pleasure.

Rich, subtle and humanistic , 29 Oct 2007
K Mansfield is an author that I really love and admire. I studied her writings at university, and rediscovered her "Selected Stories" recently with great pleasure and awe. Her style is fantastic ; her short stories focus on the characters' inner states and her depiction of human psychology is so accurate, rich and subtle. My favourites stories are Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, the Garden Party, Mr and Mrs Dove,... The poignant "Life of Ma Parker" as well as the human cruelty depicted in "Ms Brill" will make your heart bleed. An author highly recommended.

highly recommended, 04 Feb 2007
Katherine Mansfield's quietly devastating prose and absolute commitment to craft remain two of the most potent twentieth century contributions to the difficult genre of the short story. This well-chosen selection demonstrates why.

Rich in colour, atmosphere and poetry, these tales most frequently turn on questions of loss and self-realization. Mansfield often takes as her subjects the resonant emptiness of lives framed by the tightest of parameters - a lonely woman's complete attachment and identification with her canary, a man's dependence on the memory of his dead son - and times where cherished certainties fall away in moments of revelation.

Perhaps the most famous of the latter type is 'Bliss' where the abrupt emptying of juvenile hostess Bertha Mason's boundless, yet ultimately restricting, exhiliration comes as an ambiguous opportunity for both delayed misery and growth. Elsewhere, tiny phrases in conversation unravel inescapable disparities in relationships; the complex emotional tensions of Mansfield's characters lie, as in Chekhov, primarily beneath the glittering surface of her clipped and confident style.

Intricately crafted, the nuanced dimensions of these stories haunt the reader, echoing in your mind long after you've put the book down. I find them compulsively re-readable.

This selection contains all of Mansfield's most famous tales including 'Bliss', 'The Canary', 'The Fly', 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'A Dill Pickle', 'A Cup of Tea' and a recently available, unedited version of 'Je Ne Parle Pas Francais' which restores the full depth of its narrator's deliciously depraved senses of self and sensuality. A must-read.

Good, 20 Sep 2001
I enjoyed her style, her vocabulary and such plot lines as in the two strangers with an odd childish relationship in "Something childish but very natural" and one woman's journey into an occupied area of France in "An indiscreet Journey."

Very enjoyable and thoroughly satisfying!!

Elegantly crafted stories which capture the imagination, 19 Sep 2001
With her abundant usage of simile and metaphor, her sensibility and her presentation of the senses, colour, shape and aesthetic and moral perception, the indescribable style of Katherine Mansfield is present within this collection of short stories. Taken from Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), these stories are set in many places and at many times, being linked together by Mansfield's delight in beauty and the essence of life, and her slight disgust at the crude and the ugly. Mansfield's ability to create such acute pictures within the reader's mind, to veritably sweep the reader into the narrative with her descriptive language, can only be achieved through her masterful skill of crafting language. This collection is wonderful - if you have ever felt slightly disconnected from the world around you, that you have thoughts which others do not, then this collection is for you - relish the similies, melt into the metaphors and let Mansfield take you on her magic carpet ride.

A Very Good Read, 16 Nov 2008
These perfectly formed short stories are like brightly coloured miniatures in an art gallery. The author's choice of format for her stories produces a fast paced series of scenes, very visually rendered, sometimes covering a very short space of time, perhaps a few hours, one story at least probably covers half an hour. Each story ends with a sense of a line having been firmly drawn or a door firmly closed on the scene, so that one imagines the characters continuing their progress but one is satisfied that one has seen and understood enough. The stories are about characters whose feelings surprise them or hinder them or are unrecognised by them. These emotions are depicted through sharp observation of reported speech and of unexpressed inner feelings and thoughts, with revealing and sometimes comic results arising from the natural discrepancies. The author (and therefore the reader too) sees more than the characters do themselves, as in Jane Austen. Sharply observed and cool but not detached. Timeless classic writing.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

Intriguing and beautiful, 16 Nov 2007
I am new to Mansfield's work (shameful, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short stories. The selection in this book is broad and vary in length, subject and even style. Mansfield's prose is created with pained consideration to every word - the characters and atmosphere are developed within a short timeframe and hence every word counts for much. Her stories are what I would call 'easy reads' (i.e. not complex sentences or crammed with unusual words) but there is certainly more to each story than meets the eye. They are thought-provoking and it is just as relevant to consider what is NOT said than what is. It would be impossible - and it certainly wouldn't do justice - to summarise Mansfield's stories in this review. The beauty is in the individual interpretation of her work as well as the lingering pleasure derived from every sentence.

I bought this as part of a literature course I was studying but, unlike some of the texts, I'll keep this gem on my bookshelf for future reading pleasure.

Rich, subtle and humanistic , 29 Oct 2007
K Mansfield is an author that I really love and admire. I studied her writings at university, and rediscovered her "Selected Stories" recently with great pleasure and awe. Her style is fantastic ; her short stories focus on the characters' inner states and her depiction of human psychology is so accurate, rich and subtle. My favourites stories are Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, the Garden Party, Mr and Mrs Dove,... The poignant "Life of Ma Parker" as well as the human cruelty depicted in "Ms Brill" will make your heart bleed. An author highly recommended.

highly recommended, 04 Feb 2007
Katherine Mansfield's quietly devastating prose and absolute commitment to craft remain two of the most potent twentieth century contributions to the difficult genre of the short story. This well-chosen selection demonstrates why.

Rich in colour, atmosphere and poetry, these tales most frequently turn on questions of loss and self-realization. Mansfield often takes as her subjects the resonant emptiness of lives framed by the tightest of parameters - a lonely woman's complete attachment and identification with her canary, a man's dependence on the memory of his dead son - and times where cherished certainties fall away in moments of revelation.

Perhaps the most famous of the latter type is 'Bliss' where the abrupt emptying of juvenile hostess Bertha Mason's boundless, yet ultimately restricting, exhiliration comes as an ambiguous opportunity for both delayed misery and growth. Elsewhere, tiny phrases in conversation unravel inescapable disparities in relationships; the complex emotional tensions of Mansfield's characters lie, as in Chekhov, primarily beneath the glittering surface of her clipped and confident style.

Intricately crafted, the nuanced dimensions of these stories haunt the reader, echoing in your mind long after you've put the book down. I find them compulsively re-readable.

This selection contains all of Mansfield's most famous tales including 'Bliss', 'The Canary', 'The Fly', 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'A Dill Pickle', 'A Cup of Tea' and a recently available, unedited version of 'Je Ne Parle Pas Francais' which restores the full depth of its narrator's deliciously depraved senses of self and sensuality. A must-read.

Good, 20 Sep 2001
I enjoyed her style, her vocabulary and such plot lines as in the two strangers with an odd childish relationship in "Something childish but very natural" and one woman's journey into an occupied area of France in "An indiscreet Journey."

Very enjoyable and thoroughly satisfying!!

Elegantly crafted stories which capture the imagination, 19 Sep 2001
With her abundant usage of simile and metaphor, her sensibility and her presentation of the senses, colour, shape and aesthetic and moral perception, the indescribable style of Katherine Mansfield is present within this collection of short stories. Taken from Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), these stories are set in many places and at many times, being linked together by Mansfield's delight in beauty and the essence of life, and her slight disgust at the crude and the ugly. Mansfield's ability to create such acute pictures within the reader's mind, to veritably sweep the reader into the narrative with her descriptive language, can only be achieved through her masterful skill of crafting language. This collection is wonderful - if you have ever felt slightly disconnected from the world around you, that you have thoughts which others do not, then this collection is for you - relish the similies, melt into the metaphors and let Mansfield take you on her magic carpet ride.

A Very Good Read, 16 Nov 2008
These perfectly formed short stories are like brightly coloured miniatures in an art gallery. The author's choice of format for her stories produces a fast paced series of scenes, very visually rendered, sometimes covering a very short space of time, perhaps a few hours, one story at least probably covers half an hour. Each story ends with a sense of a line having been firmly drawn or a door firmly closed on the scene, so that one imagines the characters continuing their progress but one is satisfied that one has seen and understood enough. The stories are about characters whose feelings surprise them or hinder them or are unrecognised by them. These emotions are depicted through sharp observation of reported speech and of unexpressed inner feelings and thoughts, with revealing and sometimes comic results arising from the natural discrepancies. The author (and therefore the reader too) sees more than the characters do themselves, as in Jane Austen. Sharply observed and cool but not detached. Timeless classic writing.

PRELUDE TO CONFLICT, 02 Mar 2005
New Zealander Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Beauchamp), one of the key modernist authors linked to the so-called Bloomsbury set, said of this, her first commercially published work: 'It was a bad book, but the press was kind to it.'

Well, maybe it's not as bad as she says - and certainly it's a must-have for anyone who's interested in her work - but, when you get right down to it, of course, this is a bunch of stories, the theme of each of which is that "All Germans are stupid and the first person singlular Anglophile narrator (Miss Mansfield) is a civilised smart ass for pointing it out!"

Well, okay if you say so, Miss Mansfield . . . I don't think! And neither do you, I suspect - not in your literary heart of hearts. Because it's the original date of publication of the book which gives us a clue regarding the kindness that was shown to it by the press: 1912 - just two years before WWI broke out, thanks in part to press jingoism . . . and to anti-German propaganda in bad books like this one.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

If You Can Read..., 05 Sep 2008
If you can read, or can be read to, buy this book. A collection of brilliant stories for under £2.00? Good grief, if you're umming and ahhing about it, it's most peculiar. It's worth it for "At The Bay" - Mansfield captures children's dialogue so poignantly and humorously. Unusually for a Modernist writer, she has a coherence and contemporaneity that means the reader can access the worlds she creates. From the seediness of "The Little Governess", where a naive young traveller is molested by an ancient man, to "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", a bleakly comic tale of two spinsters both afraid and excited by the death of their domineering father, this collection is a treat. You don't need to be a fan of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or 'literary fiction'. These are stories of humans, outsiders who are trying to connect with one another and questioning their place in the world.

Katherine Mansfield's Private Lives, 01 Sep 2008
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'

Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.

And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'

Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.


From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model, 09 Dec 2007
Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".




Ignored Brilliance, 27 May 2001
Virginia Woolf apparently was intimidated by the work of Katherine Mansfield and reading the collected short stories certainly gave me an idea of why contemporary Woolf was awed by the talent of Mansfield. There are brilliant glimpses into the human character evident in this work. Though it may seem more tempting to buy a smaller selection, for example "The Garden Party and other short stories" it is through a more comprehensive collection such as this one that you get a sense of the author and her progression. She died young, never completing a full length novel yet the medium of the short story - I think - makes her accessible to a wider audience, even if up till now she has not been considered as a "mainstream" modernist writer. Short stories are perfect for just dipping into the book, seeing how the style and theme changes. The stories can be read as superficial glances into the upper class society of that era, yet I think a darker edge pervades the text. The symbolism of stories such as "Bliss" or "Prelude" reveals Mansfield's ingenuity in creating an underlying sense of unease. She accomplishes so much in so few pages, and this is why she threatened experimental novelist Woolf, and is so worthy of reading.

Intriguing and beautiful, 16 Nov 2007
I am new to Mansfield's work (shameful, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short stories. The selection in this book is broad and vary in length, subject and even style. Mansfield's prose is created with pained consideration to every word - the characters and atmosphere are developed within a short timeframe and hence every word counts for much. Her stories are what I would call 'easy reads' (i.e. not complex sentences or crammed with unusual words) but there is certainly more to each story than meets the eye. They are thought-provoking and it is just as relevant to consider what is NOT said than what is. It would be impossible - and it certainly wouldn't do justice - to summarise Mansfield's stories in this review. The beauty is in the individual interpretation of her work as well as the lingering pleasure derived from every sentence.

I bought this as part of a literature course I was studying but, unlike some of the texts, I'll keep this gem on my bookshelf for future reading pleasure.

Rich, subtle and humanistic , 29 Oct 2007
K Mansfield is an author that I really love and admire. I studied her writings at university, and rediscovered her "Selected Stories" recently with great pleasure and awe. Her style is fantastic ; her short stories focus on the characters' inner states and her depiction of human psychology is so accurate, rich and subtle. My favourites stories are Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, the Garden Party, Mr and Mrs Dove,... The poignant "Life of Ma Parker" as well as the human cruelty depicted in "Ms Brill" will make your heart bleed. An auth