Overview

A definitive, exquisite collection of stories exploring class, relationships, and the beauty and banality of ordinary life by an underappreciated master of the form, with an introduction by bestselling novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley. A definitive, exquisite collection of stories exploring class, relationships, and the beauty and banality of ordinary life by an underappreciated master of the form, with an introduction by bestselling novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley. ""I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of."" -Virginia Woolf In New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield's brief yet blazing literary career, she became a pillar of early-twentieth-century modernism, and left behind her own dazzling body of work. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield-which includes her two major collections of short stories, Bliss and The Garden Party, in their entirety-presents, in one volume, the oeuvre of a singular talent. In these stories, Mansfield explores themes of class and social dynamics, sexuality, and family and domestic dramas, all captured in crystalline, slyly humorous vignettes. In ""Miss Brill,"" a young woman dons her finest fur to stroll through the stately Jardins Publiques, only to be cut down by a stray remark. In ""A Cup of Tea,"" a rich woman is moved to help someone less fortunate than herself, and finds that her charity comes at a cost. Mansfield (who married twice and was romantically involved with both men and women) often turns her discerning eye to romantic relationships- in ""A Dill Pickle,"" former lovers meet by chance; in ""Bliss,"" the exuberant hostess of a dinner party discovers a shocking truth about her own relationships. Yet as Sloane Crosley writes in her introduction, Mansfield was also a brilliant writer of children, as in the classic coming-of-age tale ""The Garden Party,"" and her masterful triptych of New Zealand stories, ""Prelude,"" ""At the Bay,"" and ""The Doll's House."" It is ultimately through the eyes of her youngest characters, their disappointments as well as their sense of wonder and openness, that we see the possibilities in our ordinary world.

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Reviews

“The most emblematic woman writer of her time.”—New York Times Book Review “One of the great results of Miss Mansfield’s poetic temperament is that beauty is the general condition of her story.”—Rebecca West on The Garden Party for the New Statesman “Miss Manfield’s story—it is one of her best known—is brief, poignant and in the best sense, slight. . . . and indeed our satisfaction recognizes the skill with which the author has handled perfectly the minimum material.”—T. S. Eliot on Bliss “Beautifully written, with a touch that one might best describe as delicate. Yet it is pitiless and clear-eyed in its engagement with class, its questioning of the willful blindness and privileges of the upper middle-classes. It is my idea of the perfect story.”—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on The Garden Party for the Center for Fiction’s Model Short Story series

Author Information

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born and raised in New Zealand. She moved to England at nineteen and spent much of her life thereafter in London, where she became a prominent modernist author and moved in the same circles as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. She published three collections of short stories in her lifetime, including Bliss and The Garden Party. After she died of tuberculosis at age thirty-four, her husband published two additional volumes of her short fiction as well as posthumous collections of her poetry, letters, and journals. Sloane Crosley is the author of the memoir Grief Is for People, the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp, and the essay collections Look Alive Out There, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There'd Be Cake. She lives in New York City.

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