Short Stories (used, good condition)
Katherine Mansfield was a pioneer of the modern short story. Here Stephanie Forward provides close readings of three short stories from Mansfield’s celebrated 1922 collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories.
The Garden Party and Other Stories was published in 1922, the year before Katherine Mansfield’s untimely death from tuberculosis. An anonymous detractor in the English Review declared it to be ‘cruel, passionless and cynical’; however, in July 1922 Robert Littell acknowledged Mansfield’s ‘genius’, enthusing about her ability to evoke moods and feelings: ‘She is a connoisseur of the ripples that mean so much more than waves, a collector of little emotions caught on the wing, never pinned or bottled in her pages, but kept alive there in all their fragile iridescent colours’.[1]
Recently, Claire Tomalin has described Mansfield as ‘an original, both in her technique as a writer and the way she chose to live her life; a modernist, an innovator, an experimenter’.[2] Other notable critics have assessed her contribution to literary modernism,[3] and Clare Hanson has also argued persuasively that the central concerns of Mansfield’s fiction ‘resonate powerfully with the landscape opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis’.
