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BOOKS
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Katherine Mansfield: The Collected Stories
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By Katherine Mansfield, review by Bruce Meyer
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Katherine Mansfield: The Collected Stories
By Katherine Mansfield, review by Bruce Meyer
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Before you read the book:
Katherine Mansfield’s stories are delicate balances of perception, intuition, detail and nuance. As pieces of writing, they do not merely narrate: they penetrate to the core of the minds of her characters where we enter into an understanding of how individuals think through their feelings. For Mansfield, there is always that element in each character that we are allowed to see and understand but which is kept from the fictional world of the stories in which the characters exist. Mansfield called these inner lives of her characters “secret selves.” Throughout Mansfield’s work there is the constant assertion of individual identities in dialogue with themselves as they come to terms with the stark realities of the world around them.
Mansfield spent most of her life confronting such stark realities. Born Kathleen Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of a successful businessman who eventually became director of the Bank of New Zealand, her early life was one of relative ease and comfort. After taking her early education in New Zealand, she persuaded her father to send her to England for musical training, in part to answer her rebellious nature that was emerging both in her life and in her writing.
Matters of the heart
After a failed affair with a violinist, Mansfield impulsively married a singing teacher whom she left the day after her marriage. Sensing that Katherine had become involved in a lesbian relationship with an old school friend from New Zealand, her mother appeared in England and promptly shipped the pregnant Mansfield to a spa resort in Bavaria. Following the stillbirth of her child, Mansfield embarked on a series of affairs that included relationships with a Polish translator, a French novelist, the British editor John Middleton Murry, and the novelist D.H. Lawrence.
It was from her relationship with Lawrence that Mansfield is believed to have contracted tuberculosis. The familiar literary impact of tuberculosis – a disease suffered also by John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson and other prolific writers – seems to have spurred Mansfield to a tremendous literary output. By the time of her premature death in 1923 at Fontainebleau in France, Mansfield had produced seven exquisitely beautiful collections of short stories, numerous letters and journals. She had also earned a reputation as a talented writer among her contemporaries who included Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and many of the Garsington circle that included Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell.
Her stories often deal with the issue of change, and change was something Mansfield knew in spades during her life. Her beloved brother was killed in the First World War, an event that profoundly affected Mansfield. In many ways she is as Modernist an author as Eliot, Pound or Lawrence, and brings a uniquely feminine perspective to an era that has largely been defined by male authors. Mansfield’s stories capture the overwhelming pressures of the age, what Ezra Pound in his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts described as “an image of its accelerated grimace” where the old, traditional values of culture and society vanished in the muddy battlefields of Europe.
Mansfield’s stories were, for many years, considered to be well-written but were not given their deserved attention until the late 1970s and early 1980s when editions of her works and biographies of her life began to appear. She is now considered one of the masters of the modern short story, a writer who took the control, precision and insight of Anton Chekhov’s best short stories and gave them a unique perspective that not only presented events, but the minds and thoughts behind the narratives.
Read Mansfield's stories online
To learn more about Katherine Mansfield or to read her short stories online, visit these links (click on the coloured type):
This site from the New Zealand Book Council provides a wonderfully detailed biographical account of the author, plus links to other Mansfield-related sites.
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/nzbookcouncil/writers/mansfieldk.htm
Don’t be deceived by the title of this site on New Zealand heroes. This amazing site features photographs from Mansfield’s life, including pictures of the people and places that influenced her works. The site also features a wonderful link library and some useful biographical and bibliographic information.
http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html
This rather intriguing site from Bill Manhire, a critic at Brown University in the United States features a look inside Mansfield’s mind and examines how her sense of psychology impacts on her storytelling.
http://www.het.brown.edu/people/easther/brain/index.html
This site features Mansfield’s powerful short story, The Fly, which was written in response to the sense of futility many artists felt over the waste of the First World War.
http://www.geocities.com/short_stories_page/mansfieldthefly.html
This site features a number of Mansfield’s best short stories in online format for you to read and enjoy. Among the stories you will find here are Miss Brill, The Garden Party, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, and Bank Holiday.
http://www.classicreader.com/author.php/aut.215/
For those of you who wish to read more of Mansfield’s works online, check out Bliss and other stories at:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/mansfield/bliss/bliss.html or The Garden Party and other stories at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/mansfield/garden/garden.html
As you read the book:
Notice how Mansfield uses both the inner and outer worlds of the characters, and the movement of the stories between these two plains. What characters tend to envision for themselves, and believe in their private lives, rarely finds a sympathetic parallel in the external world where events conspire to confound their hopes. Her stories are not without resolution; they continually tell us not only what characters learn but how they learn the lessons of life. At times, her narratives of inner psychology flirt with the concept of stream of consciousness – the narration of a mind at work, in thought. In a story such as Bank Holiday, however, Mansfield replaces the narration of the inner workings of the mind with a record of the inner workings of the ear as a nameless persona moves through a crowded, fair-like street during a Bank Holiday weekend and records a collage of voices, thoughts and broken statements that somehow present us with a marvelous picture of humanity in all its variety.
Her life and times:
Mansfield, in such stories as The Daughters of the Late Colonel or The Garden Party, is quite conscious of the deep divisions evident in the society of her times between the various classes. The question of station is an issue that she cannot quite come to grips with. How does one hold on to one’s place in the world? How does one’s place in society limit or confine one’s ability to reach across class barriers to communicate empathy and compassion? And in a story such as Bliss, how does one’s artificial illusions of life hold up against the realities of human relations – and how can one’s well-heeled world protect one from the forces of destruction?
In The Fly, for example, the beauty and balance of an old, pre-First-World-War world seems to come tumbling down. We are presented, in this story and in many of her other stories, with a question of how change affects us and how we react to it.
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