It would become ‘Prelude’; the Woolfs would publish it as their third Hogarth Press title in 1918, and it would take some time for readers and critics to appreciate the strangeness in its form, its poetic distillation, its surprising open-endedness, its characters seen in their immediacy, as if historyless, and its tacit inference that story can be differently told, things can be differently seen and understood. These are just some of the reverberations of this deceptively simple-seeming, hugely innovative story. Mansfield expected it to be misunderstood. ‘Won’t the “Intellectuals” just hate it. They’ll think its a New Primer for Infant Readers. Let ’em’. 18

The ‘Intellectuals’ had, sure enough, by now had their fill of someone whose social talents were so charming, so funny, then so ‘envious, dark and full of alarming penetration,’ as Bertrand Russell, with whom Mansfield had had a brief flirtation, put it. 19 Mansfield’s talent for social doubleness was very little appreciated in the hothouse smallness of bohemian literary London. Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom she’d gushingly befriended, had begun to find her far too disquieting. Leonard Woolf, noting Mansfield’s ‘mask like’ features, wrote later about how very funny she was, how nobody had ever made him laugh more, though he felt at exactly the same time how Mansfield ‘disliked’ him. The Bloomsbury Group generally agreed – she wore a mask, she was vulgar, she dealt in ‘lies and poses’, she was ‘inscrutable’ (Virginia Woolf, in particular, was rather drawn to her inscrutability). ‘Indeed, everyone who was anyone put her down – Wyndham Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Gaudier-Brzeska – the list is endless … one wonders … why someone so gifted, so charming, should have been so universally detested,’ Angela Carter wrote. 20

Well, there was her gush of love, her repeated demand for lifelong loving friendship, so evident in her letters, and almost always followed by its darker twin, her waspish judgement. Her notebooks reveal her critical wit in a way that displays both her funniness and her barbedness. Here, for instance, Howards End gets the Mansfield treatment: ‘Not good enough. E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there aint going to be no tea. And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella’. 21 She thought Eliot ‘unspeakably dreary’. She suggested to Lawrence that he call his cottage The Phallus. (His wife, Frieda, thought this was a good idea.) ‘I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid,’ Mansfield wrote, with the perfect rhythmic assonance her prose excels in and an ear for both the acid in fastidiousness and the discipline in acidity, and the subject of this biting, luxuriously tough little sentence is, itself, literary style, her dislike of looseness in it, ‘the sort of licence that English people give themselves – to spread over and flop and roll about’. 22

There was this fact too, that she wasn’t, after all, English. There was also her ability, a feature of her work since In a German Pension, to get to the guts, the enmity, the unspoken judgementalism and the surreality of things, suspended just beneath the politest tea-time conversation. (In a German Pension she later, typically harshly, considered a work of juvenilia and refused to have republished in her lifetime. She could also be her own sharpest critic.) Her coruscation of middle-class exquisiteness in the late masterpiece, ‘The Garden-Party’, lets us know what she might have made of the social surfaces of her middle-and upper-class friends in England and, consequently, lets us sense some of the unease they’d have felt in her presence.

‘The Garden-Party’ is a perfect working example of something Mansfield’s stories perform again and again – the disruption of the surface of social convention by a final, unavoidable, different kind of reality.