Katherine Mansfield Archives

A Cup of Tea

December 23, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Cup of Tea was written on 11 January 1922 in the space of just ‘4-5 hours’ and was published in a popular magazine the Story-teller in May of the same year. It then appeared in the collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories compiled by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry and published in 1923.

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

The ostensible point of the story is that a rich and self-regarding woman has her complacency disturbed. On a whim, she makes what she thinks of as a charitable gesture to a destitute lower-class girl, only to discover (via her husband) that the girl has qualities that she herself does not possess.

However, there is another reading of the story buried subtly in the narrative and its dialogue. Rosemary is a rich and spoiled woman with a self-indulgent lifestyle who feels that her sudden encounter with a girl off the streets could be ‘an adventure … like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky’ – which in a sense that Rosemary would not understand, it does turn out to be.

She takes the girl back home, ushers her into her private bedroom, and undresses her (in the sense of taking off her hat and coat). She has the intention of leading her into another room for tea but does not do so. When the girl begins to cry, she puts her arm around the girl’s ‘thin, bird-like shoulders’ and promises to look after her.

When Rosemary’s husband Philip interrupts, the young girl gives what is clearly a false name (‘Smith’) and is strangely unfazed by the situation in which she finds herself: she is ‘strangely still and unafraid’. Rosemary describes their encounter in terms of procurement: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. She’s a real pick-up’.

Philip, the husband, is shocked by two things – first, by how attractive the girl is, and second by the inappropriate relationship that exists between the two women. He asks satirically if ‘Miss Smith’ will be dining with them, in which case he might be forced to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.

The surface implication of this remark is that the girl might be an unemployed shop girl who is sponging off his wealthy wife, but at a deeper level there is a suggestion that she might be a prostitute of some kind. At that time in the early twentieth century, the employment of single females in occupations such as milliner (hat maker) shop assistant, and other forms of casual jobs was regarded as loosely equivalent to prostitution. This suggestion in the story is reinforced by what happens next. Rosemary pays off the girl with three pound notes and sends her on her way.

The sting in the tale for Rosemary is that she wonders if she, for all the wealth and luxury in her life, lacks the animal magnetism possessed by the lower-class young girl which has left her husband Philip ‘bowled over’ after a single glance.

Narrative voice

The literary quality in the story comes largely from the skillful manner in which Mansfield creates a fluid narrative voice which combines an engagement with her subject, her readers, and even (to some extent) with herself as an identifiable narrator.

Technically, the story starts in third person narrative mode: ‘Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful’ – but that ‘not exactly’ establishes a conversational style and an attitude to the character. She raises questions, cancels thoughts (‘No, not Peter—Michael’) employs slang (‘a duck of a boy’) and speaks to an imaginary interlocutor (‘she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’).

It is also interesting to note that her use of fashionable exaggeration is remarkably similar to that being used today – almost a hundred years later: (‘her husband absolutely adored her … the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her’). This captures perfectly the speech mannerisms and the attitudes of the nouveau riche milieu in which the story is set.

A Cup of Tea – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Rosemary Fell is a socially poised young woman who has been married for two years to a rich and devoted husband. She shops in the fashionable and expensive part of the West-End in London. An ingratiating antiques dealer shows her a small enamelled box which she covets but asks to be put by for her.

Coming out of the shop into the rain, she is accosted by a poor young woman who asks for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees the incident as a potential adventure and invites the girl back home.

When they reach the house Rosemary takes the girl into her bedroom and relieves her of her hat and coat. The girl breaks down in tears and says she cannot go on any longer.

Rosemary gives the girl tea and sandwiches, whilst she herself smokes cigarettes. This relieves the girl, and they are about to start a conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of Rosemary’s husband Philip.

Philip takes Rosemary into an adjoining room and asks her what is going on. She explains that she is merely trying to be kind to a poor girl. But Philip points out that the girl is remarkably pretty, but the relationship not desirable.

Rosemary gives the girl some money, and she leaves, after which Rosemary asks her husband if she can have the enamel box she has seen – but what she really wants to know from him is if she is pretty or not.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Honeymoon

December 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Honeymoon was probably written in Paris and first appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum on 29 April 1922. The setting is not specified but seems to be the south of France, and the two characters in the story are ‘abroad’ which suggests that they are probably from New Zealand. In the workbooks for her writing Katherine Mansfield classified many of her stories by the designation L. or N.Z. according to their setting of London or New Zealand.

Honeymoon – critical commentary

George is like many of the male figures in Mansfield’s stories – a catalogue of gaucheness and insensitivity. He summons cabs in a peremptory manner which worries Fanny; he speaks French badly; thinks living in a villa would be ‘deadly’ unless surrounded by other people; deals badly with the restaurant manager; is xenophobic; and congratulates himself on his rudeness.

Whilst Fanny wants to stay at their ‘little table’ and feels that ‘nothing matter[s] except love’, George suddenly wants to go back to their hotel – the clear implication being that since he feels a flush of physical well-being, he intends to have sex with her.

The story is related largely from Fanny’s point of view, so we are presented with a rather negative character sketch of a male as perceived by a female – which is one reason why Katherine Mansfield is admired by feminists. Much of this presentation is made by understatement and implication, so none of her criticism is explicit. Indeed, Fanny is full of admiration for this man she has married – which is why it is important to register distinctions between Fanny’s views and those of the Mansfield-as-narrator.

‘Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,’ coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table , and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, ‘This all right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there?’ And he nodded to a table right over the other side.

What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was sit down and look like everybody else.

George is gauche and immediately in conflict with the manager. He congratulates himself on his antagonistic view of the interchange, and his suggestion for alternative seating puts everyone into an awkward position. Fanny naively perceives his behaviour as masterful – and yet her instinct is for a simpler, calmer resolution to the episode.

Thus we are provided with three points of view in this one brief scene: the narrator’s perceptive image of the manager’s gesture; George’s self-congratulatory egoism; and (simultaneously) Fanny’s naive admiration of her new husband at the same time as her instinct for a more sensitive response to the situation.

Honeymoon – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

Honeymoon – plot summary

A young couple, George and Fanny, are on their honeymoon on the Mediterranean coast. George is a forceful and positive character, whilst Fanny is rather hesitant and uncertain about herself.

After shopping they decide to go for tea to a hotel-restaurant on the sea front. George patronises their cab driver, and Fanny feels a sense of trepidation at the freedom afforded her by her state of being as a newlywed.

At the restaurant George resists the manager’s attempts to control them, and Fanny admires his masculinity but wonders if he wants to understand her at a deep level.

Meanwhile a small group of musicians begin playing whilst they take their tea. Then the group is joined by an old man in faded clothes who sings in Spanish with passion and fervour.

Fanny is moved by the experience and wonders existentially about the cruelty and suffering in life; but George reacts differently, feeling optimistic and physically stimulated.

George suggests that they go back to their hotel at once, before the man can start singing again – so they leave.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1888. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker, who went on to become chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She was first cousin of Elizabeth Beauchamp, who married into German aristocracy to become Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had a somewhat insecure childhood. Her mother left her when she was only one year old to go on a trip to England. She was raised largely by her grandmother, who features in some of the stories as ‘Mrs Fairfield’.

1895. She attended Karori State School with her sisters, and proved to be gifted at writing, even though her spelling was poor.

1898. Attended Wellington Girls’ High School. Some of her earliest sketches appeared in the school magazine, and she won a composition prize for ‘A Sea Voyage’.

1901. She attended a private finishing school, showed a somewhat precocious interest in notions of ‘free love’, and continued writing stories. It is obvious even at this early stage that she was interested in creating a good prose style. The following was written when she was fifteen:

This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers, has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain.

1902. She becomes very passionate about writing and music, and is greatly influenced by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, whose notoriety at that time was still at its height. She falls in love with Arnold Trowell, the son of her cello teacher.

1903. The family travel to London, and KM attends Queen’s College in Harley Street which had been founded by Charles Kingsley to prepare young women for higher education. On her first day there she meets Ida Baker, who was to become a central figure in the rest of her life. Five of her sketches appear in Queen’s College Magazine.

1906. She gives herself up to a rather bohemian lifestyle, and has affairs with both men and women. Because of this, her parents take her back home to New Zealand against her wishes.

1907. Three sketches and a poem published in the Melbourne Native Companion.

1907. Love affairs with two girls. Her family send her on a tour of New Zealand’s northern island. Love affair with a Maori girl.

1908. Her family give up in the fight against her rebellious nature, and she is allowed to go back to London with an allowance of £100 per year from her father. She lodges in Little Venice, and is in love with Garnet Trowell (Arnold’s twin brother).

1909. Pregnant by Garnet Trowell, she marries singing teacher George Bowden and leaves him the same evening (without consummating the marriage) to join a travelling light opera company in Glasgow. Her mother travels from New Zealand to restore order, and takes KM to Bavaria for what she describes as a ‘cold water cure’. She has a miscarriage.

1910. Returns to London, where she is hospitalised for gonorrhoea. She then goes back to live with her husband. Some of her stories are published in the New Age, alongside writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Hilare Belloc. At this stage she begins to suffer from severe bouts of illness.

1911. She has an abortion, then travels to Bruges and Geneva. In a German Pension published in the autumn.

1912. Meets John Middleton Murry and becomes with him the editor of a magazine which causes something of a scandal by its title alone – Rhythm. They live together, moving from England to France and back again, sometimes living together with her most devoted ex-lover, Ida Baker, who KM sometimes calls her ‘wife’.

1913. Friendships and fallings-out with both Henri and Sophia Gaudier-Brzeska, and Frieda and D.H.Lawrence. Last issue of Rhythm. Four stories published in the Blue Review, which then failed. Works as a film extra.

1914. Murry declared bankrupt: he leaves London to live in the country. KM ill: she writes love letters to fellow Rhythm contributor Francis Carco in France.

1915. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp visits her in London on his way to join regiment. KM leaves Murry and travels to Paris to live with Francis Carco. She is then reconciled with Murry, then goes back to Carco in France. Begins to write The Aloe (which becomes Prelude). Three stories published in Signature, which then folds. Brother killed in war. Moves to live in Bandol, France.

1916. Moves to Zennor, Cornwall with the Lawrences, who have violent rows and fights. Finally ‘leaves’ Murry. Visits Ottoline Morell’s home at Garsington, Oxfordshire.

1917. Moves to live in Chelsea, and begins to write ‘narratorless’ stories. Meetings with Virginia Woolf. Both of them realise that they are making similar experiments in prose fiction, and feel a combination of rivalry and friendship.

1918. Moves back to live in Bandol. Tuberculosis diagnosed. Returns to London and divorces George Bowden. Marries John Middleton Murry (wearing Frieda Lawrence’s wedding ring). They live together in a house in Hampstead – together with Ida Baker. Prelude published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

1919. Regular contact with Virginia Woolf. Writes reviews for the Athenaeum (edited by Murry). Moves to San Remo Italy with Ida Baker. Murry visits occasionally.

1920. Moves to live in Menton, France. Murry begins to dally with other women. KM returns to London. Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. Returns to France.

1921. Returns to London to scare off Princess Bibesco, who has been dallying with Murry. Moves to live in Switzerland, where her neighbour Rainer Maria Rilke is writing the Duino Elegies. Intense creative bursts between bouts of severe illness.

1922. Moves to Paris for radium treatment for her TB. Moves back to Switzerland. Murry leaves KM, who prepares her will, making Murry her literary executor. Returns to France to join in the mystic ‘treatment’ which was then fashionable at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainbebleau, France.

1923. Murry arrives in Fontainebleau on the day that KM dies – 9 January 1923, aged just thirty-five.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield – Prelude

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Katherine Mansfield, Prelude (1918)

This was the second publication of the Hogarth Press. It was a re-write of her long short story The Aloe which she had begun in 1915. 300 copies were printed.

“It is a sixty-eight-page book and we printed and bound it entirely with our own hands. The edition must have consisted of nearly 300 copies for, when it went out of print, we had sold 257 copies. Virginia did most of the setting and I did all the machining.”

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

“Prelude was published by the Hogarth Press in July 1918, an edition of 300 copies selling at 3s. 6d. It was a book of 68 pages, 19 X 14.5 cm, set in Caslon and bearing the dedication “To L.H.B. and J.M.M.” The early pages had been set by Barbara Hiles, a former student at the Slade who now worked for the Press, then mostly by Virginia Woolf, who recorded that her top speed at hand-setting was one page in an hour and a quarter. The book finally was not run off on the hand press at Hogarth House, but at a jobbing printer’s in Richmond, with Leonard himself working the machine.

The book was clearly the work of amateurs, but cleanly done and unpretentious. The Woolfs misnamed the story The Prelude in both the heading preceding section I, and in the running head as far as p.19. After the first few copies, they removed from the front of the dark blue paper jacket the line block of a woman’s head, surrounded by the spiky leaves and the flowers of the aloe and from the back cover another head, with the leaves now fallen into rather a Medusa-like severity, which had been designed by Mansfield’s friend, the Scottish painter J.D.Fergusson.”

Vincent O’Sullivan (ed), The Aloe

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Katherine Mansfield biography

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography of a literary bohemian

Katherine Mansfield has the rare distinction of being regarded as a major writer, even though she only ever published short stories. In fact her entire oeuvre is available in just one volume. There are two other biographies by Jeffrey Myers and Anthony Alpers, but Claire Tomalin’s is a fairly straightforward and very readable account of her life. She portrays her talent sympathetically, but does not disguise her weaknesses and her occasional unkindnesses, though she does seem either squeamish or even purblind where sexual matters are concerned. However, she is very well informed and spares us none of the medical details of gonnorhoea and tuberculosis which helped to bring KM’s life to a premature end.

Mansfield’s talent blossomed as soon as she was sent from her privileged but stiflingly conformist upbringing in New Zealand to be educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street. These important years – from fourteen to seventeen – confirmed her taste for artistic matters, and it was on return from there to New Zealand that she had her first success as a writer.

But in 1908 she was back in London, ready to throw herself into full scale Bohemianism. She quickly became pregnant, then tricked another man into marrying her without telling him about her condition, and left him the same night. Within the next few months she suffered a miscarriage and acquired a new Polish lover, from whom she contracted gonnorhoea.

She recovered in the company of her life-long partner Ida Baker, whom she regarded as her ‘wife’, then since she was short of money she tricked her way back into free lodging with her lawful husband and began publishing with A. R. Orage’s New Age, which was later to become the New Statesman.

More literary success followed. She published her first collection of sketches In a German Pension, then was introduced to John Middleton Murry, who became her lover then her second husband.

In structure, the book is almost one chapter per year from 1907 onwards of Mansfield’s tragically short life. Tomalin does not disguise the fact that she thinks much of the earlier work is self-indulgent, sentimental, and quite weak – which it is. But there would be greatness to come.

Lots more of La vie Boheme follows: constantly on the move; short of money; living promiscuously in every sense; and writing for small literary magazines which either don’t pay or go out of business.

She leaves Murry and travels to northern France in the middle of the First World War for an assignation with fellow artist Francis Carco, then goes back to Murray, and by 1916 is in deep with The Bloomsbury Group, even moving into a house in Gower Street with painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington.

When the first signs of the tuberculosis which was to kill her appeared, she went to live in Bandol with her ‘wife’ Ida, then when her health temporarily improved, she returned home to London and married Murray, with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda as witnesses.

She had a spasmodic but very close relationship as fellow authors with Virginia Woolf. Both of them were working on the development of the short story and the possibilities of a more elliptic prose style at the same time. Both regarded each other’s work highly, even though they knew that they were ‘rivals’.

Tomalin gives a very clear-headed critique of the patchiness of KM’s writing, as well as a persuasive account of the biographical basis for much of its content – but she does not say much about what made her writing and the development of the post-Checkhov short story so original.

KM’s last years were a restless search for a cure for her illnesses, combined with an outpouring of her greatest works. She zigzags back and forth across northern Europe, finally dying outside Paris in 1923. She was just thirty-five years old.

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Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, London: Penguin, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0140117156

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
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Katherine Mansfield critical essays

August 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

Katherine Mansfield – Critical Essays is a collection of conference papers given to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s arrival in London from New Zealand in 1908, and the start of her career as a writer. They are arranged in groups dealing with biographical readings, modernism, psychoanalytic interpretations, and autobiography. Biographist Vincent O’Sullivan attempts to explain why Mansfield was so impressed by the mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and so influenced by Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy – but his comments tell us more about the details of her last years than they do about the nature or the quality of her writing. Another essay does something similar by tracing her relationship with John Middleton Murry and the use they made of fragments of biography in the fictions they both produced.

Some essays go into endless detail blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction, ignoring the distinctions which should be made between the two. On the whole, they end up by saying very little of value about either. Considering that most of the authors are senior academics, it’s amazing that so little effort is made to be rigorous about these matters – though I suppose it proves the powerful attraction that biographical ‘evidence’ still exerts on critics, even though they might profess themselves post-modern.

Sarah Sandley is on much firmer grounds looking at Mansfield’s fondness for the cinema, and even tracing the films she was likely to have seen. She then offers fairly clear evidence from the texts to argue that she used filmic techniques in her approach to narrative.

As an aside, it is interesting to note how many of these essays revert to consideration of the same story – ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ – which anybody embarking on this volume would do well to re-read before looking at the separate studies.

There’s a brave contribution that tries to establish links between Mansfield’s writing and her interest in music. She was an accomplished cellist, and it’s true that her compositions often have a conscious structure which can be likened to a musical form. But the convincing evidence is never produced. Mansfield writes about music and has characters who are musicians – but that’s all. It’s only possible to say that one artistic form may be likened to another. Any more than that is rather like Goethe saying ‘Architecture is frozen music’: it’s a striking phrase, but it doesn’t yield analytic insights or go anywhere.

A section of psychoanalytic readings is the signal for an intensification of theoretical jargon and fashionable name-dropping – but most of the contributions remain unconvincing.

Fortunately, the last group of essays dealing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction are on much stronger ground. Mansfield left a substantial account of her life and feelings behind in her journals, letters, and notebooks, never concealing the fact that many of her stories were based on episodes from her own life.

Janet Wilson has an interesting piece which looks at Mansfield’s conflicted feelings over her status as a colonial settler and the sympathies for natives she felt – particularly in her erotic relationship with her friend, the half-Maori girl Martha Grace Mahupuku.

Angela Smith makes an insightful and largely persuasive case for Mansfield’s appreciation of Charles Dickens – a taste she held at a time when Dickens was considered passé in most literary circles.

There’s an article by Anna Jackson on the ‘poetics’ of the notebooks and letters, and the collection ends with an essay by the Mansfield scholar and novelist C.K. Stead recounting the difficulty of establishing properly edited texts of her work.

These later pieces seem to rescue the collection from the blight of literary criticism in its current manifestation as a mechanism for generating career-enhancing fodder for the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise.

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Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.241, ISBN: 023027773X

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
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Katherine Mansfield criticism

May 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Katherine Mansfield criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Mansfield and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a paperback copy of Antony Alper’s biography The Life of Katherine Mansfield was available at Amazon for one penny.

The Life of Katherine Mansfield – Antony Alpers, Oxford University Press, 1987. This is one of the first serious biographies, written by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar Antony Alpers.

Katherine Mansfield – Ida Constance Baker, London: Michael Joseph, 1971. A memoir by Mansfield’s long-suffering yet most devoted friend.

Katherine Mansfield (Writers & Their Work) – Andrew Bennet, Northcote House Publishers, 2002. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks.

Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer – Gillian Boddy, Penguin Books, 1988.

Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield – Mary Burgan, Johns Hopkins Press, 1994. This study shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women’screativity. It concludes that Mansfield’s drive toward self-integration was her strategy for writing–and for staying alive.

Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories – Pamela Dunbar, Palgrave Schol Print, 1997. A new evaluation of Katherine Mansfield reveals her as an original and highly subversive writer preoccupied with issues like sexuality and the irrationality of the human mind.

Katherine Mansfield – Joanna FitzPatrick, La Drome Press, 2014.

Katherine Mansfield (Key Women Writers) – Kate Fullbrook, Prentice Hall, 1986.

Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories – Cherry A. Hankin, London: P{algrave Macmillan, 1983.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence – Melinda Harvey, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. This study shows that ‘influence’ is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment.
Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller – Kathleen Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weaving together intimate details from Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals with the writings of her friends and acquaintances, this study creates a captivating drama of this fragile yet feisty author: her life, loves and passion for writing.
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction – Sydney Janet Kaplan, Cornell University Press, 1991.

Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A collection which ncludes essays by major scholars in several areas including musicology, postcolonial theory, epistolary and biographical studies, representing recent developments in Modernist studies and thus exploring her continued literary legacy to contemporary writers.

Katherine Mansfield and World War One – Gerri Kimber (ed), Edinburgh University Press, 2014.The articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, these essays refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy.

Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story – Gerri Kimber, Palgrave Pivot, 2014. This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield’s themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader – via close textual analysis – to an understanding of the author’s modernist techniques.

Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe.

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public – Jenny McDonnell, London: Palgrave Schol Print, 2010. This study provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain.
Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View – Jeffrey Meyers, Cooper Square Publishers, 2002. This study chronicles her tempestuous relationships (that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis.

Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction – Patrick D. Morrow, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield’s fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime.

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks – Margaret Scott, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. The first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed, these diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman.

Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) – Angela Smith, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. This study explores Mansfield’s idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive.

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life – Claire Tomalin, London: Penguin, 2012. A biography which captures the creative zest of a writer who was sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism – Janet Wilson (ed), London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Reinterpretations and readings enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to Mansfield’s diaries and letters. These essays combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class, gender, and biography/autobiography.

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
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Marriage a la Mode

December 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Marriage a la Mode was one of a group of six stories commissioned from Katherine Mansfield by Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere, a fashionable illustrated newspaper targeted at British citizens living in the colonies. The story was written in August 1921 and published in December the same year. It was later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories published in 1922.

Marriage a la Mode – William Hogarth

Marriage a la Mode – critical commentary

Anthony Alpers, Katherine Mansfield’s biographer, describes Marriage a la Mode as a ‘shallow … bill-paying’ story whose lack of depth and subtlety is a result of her badly needing money to pay doctors’ fees during her illness whilst living in Montana-sur-Sierre in Switzerland.

It is certainly true that the story requires very little close reading or interpretive skill to yield its single meaning. William is a crushed husband figure whose tender feelings for his family are completely trampled upon by his wife’s selfishness, her social climbing, and her self-indulgent bohemianism. He is more or less excluded socially from his own home by her empty-headed friends. When he is driven by necessity to communicate his love for her by letter, she responds by reading it out for the amusement and mockery of her house guests. When she realises what a heartless and vulgar thing she has done, there is a momentary impulse to reach out to her husband in response – but instead she chooses to rejoin her friends.

It is a sceptical, if not jaundiced view of marriage, but it is to Mansfield’s credit that as a writer who so often reveals masculine foibles and insensitivities in her work, she creates here a sympathetic account of a working man and a scathing portrayal of his selfish and empty-headed wife.

Plagiarism?

A number of commentators have pointed to the similarities between Marriage a la Mode and a story by Anton Checkhov called Not Wanted (1886). In fact the most severe of these critics have accused her of direct plagiarism.

In Checkhov’s story a Court official Pavel Zaikin is travelling out to his summer cottage by train in the summer heat. He complains to a fellow traveller in ‘ginger trousers’ about the cost and inconvenience, which he attributes to ‘women’s frivolity’.

He finds his son alone in the cottage: his wife is attending the rehearsal of a play and has not prepared any dinner. Zaikin feels anger gnawing at him and in bad temper he scolds his son without reason – then regrets having done so.

His wife Nadyezhda returns from the rehearsal with her friend Olga and two men. She sends the servant out for ‘sardines, vodka, and cheese’. The thespians then begin noisy rehearsals until late, after which she invites the two men to stay the night. She also moves Zaikin out of his own bed to accommodate Olga. In the early morning Zaikin gets dressed and goes out into the street, where he meets the man in ginger trousers again. He too has a houseful of unexpected visitors.

The similarities in the two stories are the working husband who is abused by a self-indulgent wife; the train journey; the houseful of disruptive bohemians; and the fact that the man is treated like an outsider in his own home.

But this was not the first time Katherine Mansfield had re-told a story by Checkhov. Her early piece The-Child-Who-Was-Tired is taken from Checkhov’s Sleepyhead (1888) and her plagiarism was the subject of a debate on her conscious or unconscious borrowings in the pages of theTimes Literary Supplement in the 1950s.

However, she composed so many original and outstanding stories of entirely her own invention, that it is unlikely these accusations will cause the damage to her reputation some people hope for and others fear. But there is one telling detail in Marriage a la Mode that nails the story inescapably to its Russian origins – and that is the choice of sardines for the improvised evening meal. Isabel’s arty friends consume sardines and whisky, whilst Checkhov’s amateur theatricals have their sardines and vodka. There is simply no escaping the fact that this detail is copied. Fish and vodka are entirely native to Russian culture, but would be exceptional in English social life.

Marriage a la Mode – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

Marriage a la Mode – plot summary

A London solicitor William is returning home on Saturday afternoon to his fashionable and demanding wife Isabel. He feels anxious about not having bought presents for his two sons, but buys them a melon and pineapple instead. He reads through legal papers, but is distracted by thoughts of his wife, who has cooled in her feelings towards him. They have moved from a modest to a much bigger house, and Isabel has made new friends, but William thinks back to their earlier days when he was happier.

Isabel is waiting for him at the station, but she is accompanied by some party-loving friends. She appropriates the fruit, and they buy sweets for the boys instead, meanwhile making asinine comments. When they arrive at the house, the party go off swimming, leaving William to reflect critically on the way the house is being run. Returning from the swim, they eat sardines and drink whisky, disattending to William.

The following day William is preparing to return to London. He has not seen his sons and has had no opportunity to talk to Isabel. When he gets to his train he decides to write to her instead.

The next day Isabel and her friends are lazing about in the sun when William’s letter arrives. It is a long love letter in which he reveals his feelings for her, and says he doesn’t want to stand between her and her happiness. She reads it out aloud to her friends, who scoff and make fun of the letter. Isabel suddenly feels ashamed of what she has done, and has the impulse to write a reply, but when the friends invite her to go swimming, she leaves with them instead.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Short Story – essential works

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tutorial and guide to important texts

The short story is as old as the earliest tale-telling. Many longer narratives such as epics and myths (such as the Bible) contain short episodes which can be extracted as stories. But as a distinct literary genre, the short story came into its own during the early nineteenth century. Many writers have created successful short stories – but those which follow are the prose artists who have had most influence on its development in terms of form. We will be adding more guidance notes and examples as time goes on.

Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his Tales of Mystery and Imagination. These are tight, beautifully crafted exercises in plot, suspense, psychological drama, and sheer horror. He also invented the detective story. This is the birth of the modern short story. Poe was writing for magazines and journals. He has a spectacularly florid style, and his settings of dungeons and crumbling houses come straight out of the Gothic tradition. He’s most famous for stories such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Black Cat’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which vividly dramatise extreme states of psychological terror, anxiety, and what we would now call existential threat. He also theorised about the story, claiming that every part should be contributing to the whole, and the story should be short enough to read at one sitting. This edition is good because it includes the best of the stories, plus some essays and reviews. An ideal starting point.
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How short is short?

There is no fixed length for a short story. Readers generally expect a character, an event of some kind, and a sense of resolution. But Virginia Woolf got most of this in to one page in her experimental short story Monday or Tuesday. There are also ‘abrupt fictions’ of a paragraph or two – but these tend to be not much more than anecdotes.

There’s an often recounted anecdote regarding a competition for the shortest possible short story. It was won by Ernest Hemingway with an entry of one sentence in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

There are also quite long stories – such as those written by Henry James. If the narrative sticks to one character and one issue or episode, they remain stories. If they stray into greater degrees of complexity and develop expanded themes and dense structure – then they often become novellas. Examples of these include Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Nathaniel Hawthorne produced stories that are beautifully crafted studies in symbolism, moral ambiguity, and metaphors of the American psyche. His tales are full of characters oppressed by consciousness of sin, guilt, and retribution. They explore the traditions and the consequences of the Puritanism Europe exported to America. Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories in the Oxford University Press edition presents twenty of Hawthorne’s best tales. It’s the first in paperback to offer his most important short works with full annotation in one volume.
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Guy de Maupassant brought the subject matter of the story down to an everyday level which shocked readers at the time – and can still do so now. He also began to downgrade the element of plot and suspense in favour of character revelation. He was a relative of Flaubert, a novelist manqué, and bon viveur who died at forty-three of syphilis in a madhouse. Nevertheless he left behind him an oeuvre of more than 300 stories. His tone is objective, detached, and often deeply ironic; and he is celebrated for the exactness and accuracy of his observations, and the balance and precision of his style. Although most of his stories appear at first to be nothing more than brief and rather transparent anecdotes, the best succeed in giving impressionistic but truthful insights into the hidden lives of people caught amidst the trials of everyday existence.
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Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN 041593883X. This is a study of the development of the short story as a literary genre – from its origins to the present day. It takes in most of the major figures – Poe, Hawthorn, James, Conrad, Hemingway, Borges, and Cheever. There’s also a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into how stories are analysed as part of undergraduate studies, this is an excellent place to start.
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Katherine Mansfield is one of the few major writers who worked entirely within the short story form. Her finest work is available in just one volume. She followed Chekhov in paring down the dramatic element of the short story to a minimum, whilst raising its level of subtlety and psychological insight to new heights. Every smallest detail within her stories is carefully chosen to complete a pattern which the whole tale symbolises. She was also an early feminist in presenting many of her stories from a convincingly radical point of view. In this she was rather like her friend and contemporary, Virginia Woolf with whom she discussed the new literary techniques they were both developing at the same time. Unfortunately, Katherine Mansfield died at only thirty-five when she was at the height of her powers.
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James Joyce published Dubliners in 1916 and established himself immediately as a great writer. This has been an enormously influential collection which helped to establish the form of the modern short story. These are studies of Dublin life and characters written in a stark, pared-down style. Most of the characters and scenes are mean and petty – sometimes even tragic. Joyce had difficulty finding a publisher for this his first book, and it did not appear until many years after it had been written. It was severely attacked because the names of actual persons and places in Dublin are mentioned in it. Several of the characters introduced in Dubliners eventually reappear in his great novel Ulysses. In terms of literary technique, Joyce is best known for his use of the ‘epiphany’ – the revealing moment or experience used as a focal point for the purpose of the story.
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The Whiplash Ending

It used to be thought that the ‘point’ of a short story was best held back until the last paragraph. The idea was that the reader was being entertained – and then suddenly surprised by a revelation or an unexpected reversal or twist. O. Henry popularised this device in the US. However, most serious modern writers after Chekhov came to think that this was rather a cheap strategy. They proposed instead the relatively eventless story which presents a situation that unfolds itself to the reader for contemplation.

Virginia Woolf took the short story as it had come to be developed post-Chekhov, and with it she blended the prose poem, poetic meditations, and the plotless event. Her finest achievements in this form – Kew Gardens, Sunday or Monday, and The Lady in the Looking-glass‘ – create new linguistic worlds without the prop of a story line. These offer a poetic evocation of life and meditations on time, memory, and death. This edition contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is well presented and edited in a scholarly manner by Susan Dick.
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Franz Kafka created stories and ‘fragments’ (as he called them) which are a strange, often nightmarish mixture of tale and philosophic meditation. Start with Metamorphosis – the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s first publication – a slim volume of what he called ‘Meditations’ – as well as the forty-page ‘Letter to his Father’. It also contains the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’. Kafka is famous for having anticipated in his work many of the modern states of psychological angst, alienation, and existential terror which became commonplace later in the century.
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Epiphanies and Moments

James Joyce’s contribution to the short story was a device he called the ‘epiphany’. Following Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote the series of stories Dubliners which were pared down in terms of literary style and focussed their effect on a revelation. A sudden remark, a symbol, or moment epitomises and clarifies the meaning of a complex experience. This usually comes at the end of the story – either for the character in the story or for the reader. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf followed a similar route of playing down action and events in favour of dramatising insights into character and states of mind. Woolf called these ‘moments of being’.

Jorge Luis Borges like Katherine Mansfield, only wrote short stories. He was an Argentinian, much influenced by English Literature. His tales manage to combine literary playfulness and a rich style with strange explorations of mind-bending ideas. He is credited as one of the fathers of magical realism, which is one feature of Latin-American literature which has spread worldwide since the 1960s. His stories often start in a concrete, realistic world then gradually slide into strange dreamlike states and end up leaving you to wonder where on earth you are, and how you got there. Funes, the Memorious explores the idea of a man who cannot forget anything; The Garden of Forking Paths is a marvellous double-take on the detective story; and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a pseudo-essay concerning encyclopedia entries of an imaginary world – which begin to invade and multiply within our own. He also wrote some rather amusing literary spoofs, which are collected in this edition.
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Ernest Hemingway trained as a newspaper reporter and began writing short stories in the post-Chekhov period, consciously influenced by his admiration for the Russian novelist Turgenev. He is celebrated for his terseness and understatement – a sort of literary tough-guy style which was much imitated at one time His persistent themes are physical and moral courage, stoicism, and what he called ‘grace under pressure’. Because his stories are so pared to the bone, free of all superfluous decoration, and so reliant on the closely observed detail, they fit well within the modernist style. He once won a bet that he could write a short story in six words. The result was – ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ His reputation as a novelist has plummeted recently, but his stories are still worth reading.
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John Cheever is a story writer in the smooth and sophisticated New Yorker school. His writing is urbane, thoughtful, and his social details well observed. What he writes about are the small moments of enlightenment which lie waiting in everyday life, as well as the smouldering vices which lurk beneath the polite surface of suburban America. This is no doubt a reflection of Cheever’s own experience. For many years as a successful writer and family man he was also an alcoholic and led a secret double life as a homosexual. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous social persona and inner corruption. His is a literary approach which has given rise to many imitators, perhaps the best known of whom is Anne Tyler. He’s sometimes called ‘the Checkhov of the suburbs’.

Nadine Gordimer is one of the few modern writers who have developed the short story as a literary genre beyond what Virginia Woolf pushed it to in the early modernist phase. She starts off in modern post-Chekhovian mode presenting situations which have little drama but which invite the reader to contemplate states of being or moods which illustrate the ideologies of South Africa. Technically, she experiments heavily with point of view, narrative perspective, unexplained incidents, switches between internal monologue and third person narrative and a heavy use of ‘as if’ prose where narrator-author boundaries become very blurred. Some of her stories became more lyrical, more compacted and symbolic, abandoning any semblance of conventional story or plot in favour of a poetic meditation on a theme. All of this can make enormous demands upon the reader. Sometimes, on first reading, it’s even hard to know what is going on. But gradually a densely concentrated image or an idea will emerge – the equivalent of a Joycean ‘epiphany’ – and everything falls into place. Her own collection of Selected Stories are UK National Curriculum recommended reading.
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More on literature
More on the novella
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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

A Cup of Tea – study resources

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Honeymoon – critical commentary

Honeymoon – study resources

Honeymoon – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

biography of a literary bohemian

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Marriage a la Mode – critical commentary

Marriage a la Mode – study resources

Marriage a la Mode – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary – critical commentary

The Canary – study resources

The Canary – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

tutorial and guide to important texts

How short is short?

The Whiplash Ending

Epiphanies and Moments

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