From tired Rosabel’s impoverished youth to the precarious middle age of Ada Moss, Mansfield portrays with translucent accuracy the hopes of those on the verge of despair. She knows how precious hope is, and how brave and foolish you have to be to hang on to it.
Through the quality of her attention and even her use of things like ellipses and exclamation marks, Mansfield captures perfectly the way we drift from a thought, nudge up against it, only to have it elude our focus. Some things are easier not examined. The stories often turn on that moment when recognition is unavoidable, or is evaded one last, possibly fatal time. Part of her gift to the reader is that all of this is achieved in the subtext, that we’re allowed to intuit the real story without it being spelled out.
The stories in this selection appeared over a period of fourteen years, so we witness the development of an extraordinary talent at different stages. The final story, ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, was the first to be published, in 1908. The mechanics are obvious, and result in more explicit youthful assertions than Mansfield would allow in the later work, where the authority is so lightly controlled it seems to disappear. She died when she was just thirty-four. What would she have done next? It’s a ridiculous question, impossible to answer, impossible not to be plagued by. Yes, she had worked on the beginnings of novels and had plans for ‘a kind of serial novel’ (how twenty-first century!)—but it is hooey to think that a novel must be an advance on stories as remarkable as these.
If you’re interested in her life, read one of the many good biographies or imaginary works that draw on it, or find her in the letters and journals. If you want to know more about life, read these stories. As Mansfield wrote of Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence: ‘All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me.’
Sources
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (five volumes, 1915–1941)
The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry (1927)
Damien Wilkins, The Fainter (2006)
Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer (2007)
James Joyce, Stephen Hero (1944)
Gillian Boddy, ‘Mansfield, Katherine—Biography’, Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand (teara.govt.nz)
Katherine Mansfield, Novels and Novelists, ed.
J. Middleton Murry (1930), quoted in Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987)
AT THE BAY
I
Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again. . . .
Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea.
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