Selected Stories

Virginia Woolf said of Katherine Mansfield, 'l was jealous of her writing. The only writing 1 have ever been jealous of". D. H. Lawrence compared Katherine Mansfield to Dickens, and used her as the model for Gudrun in Women in Love. Before her death in 1923 at the age Of 34, she had written some of the finest short stories in the English language. This selection includes Mansfield's very best work and gathers twenty-seven stories from four books: Bliss (1920), The Garden-Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923), and Something Childish (1924). The arrangement is chronological, so that the stories set in New Zealand alternate, as was Katherine Mansfield's intention, with those set in London, France, and elsewhere. But whatever their setting or subject, the stories are marked by an extraordinary delicacy and intensity in the treatment of human behaviour and a style which is both poetic and powerful.