The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield pdf Katherine Mansfield Free Download

KATHERINE MANSFIELD was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She came to London for the latter part of her education, and could not settle down back in Wellington society; in 1908 she again left for Europe, never to return. Her first writing (apart from some early sketches) was published in The New Age, to which she became a regular contributor. Her first book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. She was a conscious modernist, an experimenter in life and writing, and mixed with others of her kind, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. With ‘Prelude’ in 1918 she evolved her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction. By 1917 she had contracted tuberculosis, and from that time led a wandering life in search of health. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was published in 1920, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year later. It was the last book to be published in her lifetime. After her death, two more collections of stories were published, as well as her Letters, and later, her Journal.

ALI SMITH was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories and The Accidental.

Introduction

‘Writers ought to have a real claim on each other,’ Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1921, from Montana-sur-Sierre in Switzerland, on a postcard to the young writer William Gerhardi. She was helping Gerhardi, who had written to her because he loved her story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, to find a publisher for his first novel. Over the autumn of 1921 the senior writer chides the junior gently about aspects of his writing: ‘the rain thumped. Dont you mean the rain drummed?’ With a kind of double tension typical of her in every way, she tells him about, and at the same time denies, her grave state of health: ‘yes I live in Switzerland because I have consumption. But I am not an invalid. Consumption doesn’t belong to me. Its only a horrid stray dog who has persisted in following me for four years, so I am trying to lose him among these mountains’.

Mansfield was expert at being more than one thing at once, and she confides in this brand-new correspondent here in a way that manages to be both formal and intimate, world-weary and naive: ‘you know – if I may speak in confidence – I shall not be ‘fashionable’ long. They will find me out; they will be disgusted; they will shiver in dismay. I like such awfully unfashionable things – and people – I like sitting on doorsteps, & talking to the old woman who brings quinces, & going for picnics in a jolting little waggon, and listening to the kind of music they play in public gardens on warm evenings… you see I am not a high brow. Sunday lunches and very intricate conversations on Sex and that ‘fatigue’ which is so essential and that awful ‘brightness’ which is even more essential – these things I flee from. I’m in love with life – terribly.’ The senior blesses the junior, formally, benevolently: ‘Goodbye. I hope you will write wonderful stories; numbers of them.

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The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield Read Online

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Contents

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Introduction

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