Katherine Mansfield – The Short Stories – Volume 2

The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. In this volume we examine some of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield. She was born on 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand the middle child of five. A gifted Cellist, at one point she thought she might take it up professionally. However she had a gift for writing that was slowly developing and her first writings were published in school magazines. At 19 Katherine left for Great Britain and met the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. She travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand in 1906 she began to write the short stories that she would later become famous for. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. By 1908 she had returned to London and to a rather more bohemian lifestyle. A passionate affair resulted in her becoming pregnant but married off instead to an older man who she left the same evening with the marriage unconsummated. She was then to miscarry and be cut out of her mothers’ will (allegedly because of her lesbianism). In 1911 she was to start a relationship with John Middleton Murry a magazine editor and although it was volatile it enabled her to write some of her best stories. During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the tender age of 34 on January 9th 1923 in Fontainebleau, France