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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,…
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…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) A number of modernist novels are praised as among the greatest novels of the twentieth century: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, to offer just three examples. But modernist fiction had its origins in the short story form, and many of…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Free indirect style, alternatively known as free indirect speech or free indirect discourse, is a narrative style which requires some explanation and unpicking, since it is subtle and sometimes difficult to spot in a work of fiction. However, it is one of the most powerful tools a writer possesses,…
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…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ is one of her first great short stories – the genre she excelled at (she never wrote a novel, and her poetry failed to make a mark on the literary world). ‘Bliss’ was first published in 1918, and is shot through with homoerotic longing and the…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’: as titles go, it is one of Katherine Mansfield’s more helpfully instructive. This modernist short story from 1922 focuses on Josephine and Constantia, or ‘Jug’ and ‘Con’ as they affectionately know each other, two sisters whose father, the ‘late colonel’ of the story’s…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Prelude’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s longest, and finest, short stories. Centring on the Burnell family as they move house in New Zealand, ‘Prelude’ is the opening story in Katherine Mansfield’s first ‘mature’ collection of fiction, Bliss and Other Stories (1920), although the story had first been published two…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Prelude’, the long short story which opens Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 collection Bliss and Other Stories, is a modernist masterpiece. But like much modernist fiction, its meaning and its subtle use of symbolism and other narrative devices are unlikely to be fully apparent after a first, or even a second…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The novels and short stories of the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) are important precursors to twentieth-century modernism, and can be viewed as forerunners to the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and other high modernists. Where other nineteenth-century writers tended to privilege plot over character, and action…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Family plays an important part in much fiction, of course, but sometimes the short story form has offered us an insight into family life that the longer novel does not. Because it can only provide us with a few snapshots, or a handful of moments, perhaps even just one…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Marriage is a key theme in literature, of course: a fact which need hardly surprise us when we reflect that many people spend the majority of their lives married to somebody else. Marriage also touches upon other prominent themes, including love, commitment, having children, lust, conflict, and even, in…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Many notable short stories focus on the rough passage from childhood to adulthood. Of course, the transition from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ does not happen overnight, and is not the result of a single epiphany of crucial moment, but writers of short fiction often distil the development from innocence to…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Miss Brill’ is a short story by the New-Zealand-born modernist writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). The story was first published in the Athenaeum in 1920 and then included in Mansfield’s 1922 collection The Garden Party and Other Stories: a book which, along with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James…
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The 1918 short story ‘Bliss’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied stories by the writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). Although Mansfield never wrote a novel, her short stories helped to redefine the possibilities of the story form. ‘Bliss’ is a story full of ambiguous and intriguing symbols…
Katherine Mansfield’s (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) themes are not hard to discover. In 1918, she set herself the tasks of communicating the exhilarating delicacy and peacefulness of the world’s beauty and also of crying out against “corruption.” A reader will soon make his or her own list of themes: the yearnings, complexities,…
Narrative ends with a Self Revelation followed by a hint at the main character's New Equilibrium, though sometimes writers leave off the New Equilibrium.
Katherine Mansfield finished "The Garden Party" in 1921. This short story is considered one of her best. The author was facing imminent death at this time.
"A Dill Pickle" is a 1917 short story by Katherine Mansfield. Over the course of a single cafe scene, a woman meets up with a former beau.
On the surface level, “The Wind Blows” by Katherine Mansfield is a coming-of-age short story about an adolescent girl (Matilda) who wakes up one morning, nervous and tense. While the wind blows outside, she gets ready for her music lesson. Before she leaves she has a minor disagreement with her mother. She has her music […]