Selected Stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

KATHERINE MANSFIELD
was born in Wellington in 1888 and left for London in 1903 to finish her schooling. After travelling in Europe she returned to New Zealand in 1906 and started writing stories, some of which were published in Australia. Two years later, intent on becoming a professional writer, she again went to London.

Mansfield began submitting stories to literary magazines, notably the
New Age.
A series of failed relationships, including an unconsummated marriage to the singing teacher George Bowden, did not slow her output. The collection
In a German Pension
was published in 1911.

That year Mansfield commenced the turbulent relationship with the writer John Middleton Murry that would last until her death. Their circle of friends included D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.

Mansfield was shocked by her brother's death in World War I, and in 1917 she contracted tuberculosis. The subsequent years were nevertheless productive, leading to the acclaimed collections
Bliss
and
The Garden Party.

She spent her last years seeking cures for her tuberculosis. In October 1922 she moved to France for treatment but died the following January, aged thirty-four.

With Mansfield's reputation on the ascent Murry began editing her unpublished works, resulting in two volumes of stories, as well as collections of poetry, criticism, letters and journals.

EMILY PERKINS
is the author of four novels, including
Novel About My Wife,
and a collection of short stories,
Not Her Real Name.
She teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland. Her latest book is
The Forrests.

ALSO BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Fiction

In a German Pension

Bliss and Other Stories

The Garden Party and Other Stories

The Doves' Nest and Other Stories

Something Childish and Other Stories

Non-fiction

Novels and Novelists

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield

The Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield

The Journal of Katherine Mansfield

 

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This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

‘The Luft Bad' and ‘A Birthday' first published in
In a German Pension
(1911); ‘Je ne parle pas français', ‘Bliss', ‘Psychology', ‘Pictures', ‘Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day', ‘A Dill Pickle', ‘The Little Governess' and ‘The Escape' first published in
Bliss and Other Stories
(1921); ‘At the Bay', ‘The Garden Party', ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel', ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove', ‘The Life of Ma Parker', ‘Marriage à la Mode', ‘Miss Brill', ‘Her First Ball', ‘An Ideal Family' and ‘The Lady's Maid' first published in
The Garden Party and Other Stories
(1922); ‘The Doll's House' and ‘The Fly' first published in
The Doves' Nest and Other Stories
(1923); ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel' first published in
Something Childish and Other Stories
(1924)

Cover design by WH Chong

Page design by Text

eBook production by
Midland Typesetters
, Australia

Primary print ISBN: 9781922079503

Ebook ISBN: 9781921961786

Author: Mansfield, Katherine, 1888–1923

Title: Selected stories / by Katherine Mansfield ; introduction by Emily Perkins.

Series: Text classics

Dewey Number: NZ823.2

 

CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTION

Hiding in Plain Sight

by Emily Perkins

 

Selected Stories

 

At the Bay

The Lady's Maid

Mr. and Mrs. Dove

The Garden Party

Marriage à la Mode

The Daughters of the Late Colonel

The Life of Ma Parker

Bliss

The Fly

The Doll's House

Her First Ball

An Ideal Family

The Escape

The Little Governess

Pictures

Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day

The Luft Bad

Miss Brill

A Birthday

Je ne parle pas français 329

Psychology

A Dill Pickle

The Tiredness of Rosabel

 

MAYBE my favourite Katherine Mansfield character is Miss Ada Moss in ‘Pictures', the singer past her prime caught on the knife-edge of dignity. (It's a mark of her desperation that when she can no longer get employed as a contralto she chases work as...an actor.) She is a mystery to herself, as we all are, and Mansfield is never better than when she breaks with the sympathetic close narration at which she was a genius to give a little shock of unpremeditated behaviour. Her characters find themselves—in both senses of the phrase—doing things. Survival is our most powerful urge, and even Mansfield's deluded creations, like the Little Governess whose every misstep makes the reader wince in anticipation of dramatic irony, are driven by it.

But we're not really drawn to characters; we're drawn to the voices that make them. When I first read Mansfield I also fell for Bertha, the unknowing wife in ‘Bliss' positively melting with the luminous beauty of everything around her, the discovery of desire. And the thwarted, crushed ego of the former lover in ‘A Dill Pickle'. And Kezia, and Our Else, and the amoral narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas français'—not for the special brand of unctuousness he reserves for himself, but for ‘his' first five pages, the scene setting in the tawdry café, the fragmenting of a person into a piece of writing so that perception appears to split apart and come together, forming a quilted world, the seams still showing.

It's daring, leaving those seams, letting the threads split so we might be looking through at a strange ground, the author behind the page. And it's evilly funny. The narrator thinks of a phrase, decides to make a note of it, casts around for a writing pad: ‘No paper or envelopes, of course. Only a morsel of pink blotting paper, incredibly soft and limp and almost moist, like the tongue of a little dead kitten, which I've never felt.'

We shouldn't require writing to feel contemporary to be able to love it, but doesn't that line, blotting paper aside, carry a tang of the present? In her short life Mansfield saw the explosion of modernism, the corrosive war. But her stories bridge the gap. ‘Risk anything!' she challenges across time. ‘Care no more for the opinion of others...Act for yourself. Face the truth.' Truth, as we perhaps understand it now, is the business of moments. Mansfield infused her writing with the swelling, potent truth of each instant, committed to utterly by her characters, even if that truth swivelled to face the other way seconds later.

She writes about outsiders, though they don't always know their status. Reginald Peacock is practically an outsider to humanity, but he has no sense of that: everything is his wife's fault. Perhaps he seems an outsider because—paradoxically—of the focus on his inner life, how he is separated from the world but indisputably of it, making his way through sensation and experience. Mansfield's characters are outsiders in other ways, too—outside safety, outside knowledge, often possessed of only half the picture.

 

The problem of sex features in Mansfield's stories, as do kindness, betrayal, strange alliances. And they're funny. The humour is absurd and often sharp. It brings to mind a phrase by another New Zealand writer, Damien Wilkins: ‘just the right amount of cruelty'. Death is here as well, and makes the humming of detail more intense. There's never
nothing
but its threat is there, quite matter-of-fact, in the dead man in ‘The Garden Party', the grandson of heartbreaking Ma Parker, a photograph of a boy in uniform. We are defenceless against that magnet: we put things up to protect ourselves, like the boss in ‘The Fly' with his ‘New carpet...' ‘New Furniture...' ‘Electric heating!'—but it's futile.

Mansfield's brother was killed in France in 1915; she knew the possibility of her own premature death when the first spot on her lung was diagnosed, two years later. She'd come from privilege but her adult life was hard, and she and John Middleton Murry endured relocations and bankruptcy and the loss of their literary journal and much worse. She knew the perilous line she made her characters walk and was tough on herself, dissatisfied with her work. It sounds bloody awful a lot of the time, but also like a teen fantasy of an artist's life—impoverished, striving, short—and this is why I feel ambivalent about the fascination with her biography, even as I share it. The thrilling recent discovery of unpublished stories was greeted with special excitement about their autobiographical value.

Mansfield's vivid journals and letters, though never intended for our eyes, have appeared in different incarnations, presenting various selves. You could fill a book with things other people said about Mansfield and be no closer to knowing her. Virginia Woolf's diary provides two poles: admiration (‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of') and contempt (‘stinks like a...civet cat'). No prizes for guessing which observation she made when Mansfield was alive and which one after her death.