By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the pioneers of the modernist short story in English, taking her cue from Russian writers like Anton Chekhov. Below we’ve given a brief beginner’s guide to five of Mansfield’s very best short stories, with links to where each of them can be read online.
The life and work of short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, in five pieces of trivia
1. Katherine Mansfield was the only writer who made Virginia Woolf jealous. When Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis, aged just 35, in 1923, fellow modernist writer Virginia Woolf confided in her diary: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ Mansfield’s short stories – notably ‘Bliss’ (1918) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1920) – are among the most important works of Anglophone modernist fiction. Like many modernist writers (though unlike Woolf), Mansfield was born and raised outside of Victorian England, in New Zealand (where she was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888, the same year as fellow modernist T. S. Eliot). She grew up to be unconventional in both her lifestyle and her writing.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Garden Party’ (1920) is probably Katherine Mansfield’s best-known and best-loved story. She never wrote a full-length novel, but – taking her cue from such innovators as Anton Chekhov – made the short story form her own.
A brief introduction to the story’s plot, themes, and language will, we hope, help to demonstrate why the story has become a classic example of modernist literature.