‘The Life of Ma Parker’ by Katherine Mansfield

Ma Parker cleans the house of a “literary gentleman”, and we meet them both on the day after she has buried her grandson, Lennie. Ma Parker has had a life of almost unimaginable suffering – her knees ache from years of relentless work, and her spirit is bruised by infinite small injustices and the loss of her husband and seven of her thirteen children – but it’s the death of Lennie that brings her, finally, to breaking point. The moment has come, she realises, to let out the years of misery – “but to have a proper cry over all these things would take a long time”.

I suspect (and fear) that some people find this story mawkish or unsubtle. Admittedly, the characters sometimes teeter on the edge of caricature, but to me, the wonder of it is that it although the story could slide into sentimentality, it doesn’t. There are terrible, unexpected shards of observation, such as the way that Ma Parker’s childhood memories have been reduced to a just a couple of fleeting images and stock phrases, as if she’s been deprived even of the right to tell her own history.

The story doesn’t resolve or offer any sort of redemption, and the ending is brutal. It seems simply to bear witness to the fact that, much as we wish it weren’t the case, life can be like this. Sometimes there’s a strange, small comfort in that.

First published in The Garden Party and other stories, Alfred A. Knopf 1922, and widely collected. Available to read online at the Katherine Mansfield Society here

‘Prelude’ by Katherine Mansfield

One of the first short stories I remember reading was Prelude by Katherine Mansfield. I read it first in the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, the first book I bought at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1995! I remember the excitement of reading Katherine Mansfield for the first time, and the feeling of absolute immersion in the world of the Burnell children, as Kezia and Lotty are left behind with neighbours as the family move house.

I was immediately seduced by the voices, the silent observations of characters, the way they moved through houses and gardens and lingered in rooms:

“As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark crept the wind snuffling and howling. The windows of the empty house shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly. Kezia was suddenly quite, quite still, with wide open eyes and knees pressed together. She was frightened.”

…and the careful descriptions of the objects inside:

“A little piano stood against the wall with yellow pleated silk let into the carved front. Above it hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised-looking clematis. Each flower was the size of a small saucer, with a centre like an astonished eye fringed in black.”

Soon we are with the rest of the household in their new home, following their movements and interactions, and observing the many small private moments in the day that make up a whole life.

First published by the Hogarth Press in July 1918; collected in Bliss and Other Stories, 1920. Available to read online here

‘At The Bay’ by Katherine Mansfield

In the story ‘At the Bay’, Katherine Mansfield continues her observations of the Burnell family, and also their cousins, friends, servants, all in a single perfect summer’s day. So much is captured in the colours and glimpses of life by the sea, the new people they meet, the conversations that conceal dangers beneath their sunlit surface. Even the most placid conversations and languid friendly encounters hold a power to corrupt the idyll.

“That’s right, breathed the voice, and it teased, You’re not frightened, are you?… She was terrified, and it seemed to her everything was different. The moonlight stared and glittered; the shadows were like bars of iron. Her hand was taken.”

First published in The London Mercury in January 1922, Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, 1922. Available to read online here

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

I always think of ‘The Garden Party’ as a perfect story of epiphany. Like Joyce’s ‘Araby’, it introduces its protagonist in place, time and milieu, and ends at the moment she learns a new and irreversible lesson about the world, a lesson that does not need to be named outright because the story up to that point has carefully made the substance of that epiphany legible:

‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life—’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.

‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.’

When I first read this story 10 years ago, I understood Laura’s epiphany to be about death – the accidental death of a working-class neighbour on the day of her family’s garden party causes the young protagonist to realise that death looms over life and that she too will die one day – and missed the extent to which the story is about her burgeoning class-consciousness. From the beginning of the story, when she is sent out to instruct the workmen assembling the marquee and disarmed by their friendliness, to the end, when she has to confront the squalid living conditions of her neighbours, the story is about her coming to understand not only that death always looms over life, nor that some people live well at the expense of others living poorly, but that death looms more closely and meanly over the lives of the poor than over those of the wealthy.

First published in The Westminster Gazette in 1922. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable and Robinson, 1922). Available to read online here

‘The Voyage’ by Katherine Mansfield

Fenella is a young girl who travels across the sea with her grandmother, who is taking her to live with her and Fenella’s grandfather. And that’s pretty much it in way of “what happens”. The story starts as Fenella’s father accompanies them to the ship and ends when they reach the house of Fenella’s grandparents. To be honest, it’s not very exciting to read. The strength of the story lies in what is not being told, and in the undercurrents of Fenella’s perception of the unknown environment and of the great unknown which lies ahead. “On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons…” The story subtly reflects Fenella’s childlike consciousness and emphasizes details that are otherwise quickly overlooked—a woman’s hat, the creak of the ship, the strangeness of the landscape. These sensory observations highlight Fenella’s insecurity, but also awareness, as she navigates a world that feels vast and incomprehensible.

First published in The Sphere, December 24th, 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable, 1922

‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

As a teacher reading this out loud in class, my job is to get across the delicate atmosphere in the house of Constantia and Josephine in the aftermath of their domineering father’s death. They are very different characters, but both it seems are simultaneously aging and childlike. The story is funny and tender, and a perfect demonstration of Mansfield’s delicate touch.

First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories, Constable, 1922

‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield

It is impossible for me to think about Mrs. Dalloway without also thinking of ‘The Garden Party’ which should be recommendation enough. Mansfield’s story, like Woolf’s novel, is about death in the middle of a party, but instead of Clarissa and her middle-aged memories and longings we have Mansfield’s child protagonist Laura hovering between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowledge, life and death, wealth and poverty, witness, and denial. Written in prose like dappled sunlight and deep shadow.

First published in 1922 as a three-part serial in the Westminster Gazette and later collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Alfred A Knopf, Inc and widely anthologized and available, including at Project Gutenberg

‘A Dill Pickle’ by Katherine Mansfield

This is a deliciously stop-start story that veers wildly between passion and indifference. I can smell the zest of the orange peel, clearly see the waft of the Russian cigarette smoke, and taste the titular dill pickle. Like a lot of my favourite short stories, it’s a portrait of disconnection, misconnection, and the potential for something more (whether really desirable or not) cut off or cut short. I applaud it for its an exquisitely enticing opening line: “And then, after six years, she saw him again.”

First published in The New Age on 4 October 1917; collected in Bliss & Other Stories, Wordsworth Classics, 1998, and available to read online here

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

When my undergraduate creative writing professor assigned Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’, I was resistant to reading what seemed, on first impressions, to be a story about a frivolous, wealthy English woman preparing for a party. But this story taught me that first impressions are deceptive. Here, a single overheard conversation changes everything—a brief, fleeting moment, but significant enough to undo a life—and by the end of the story, we understand that the source of Bertha’s “bliss” up until now has been her ignorance. After that innocence is lost, it’s impossible to read the story the way you did the first time. On a second read, Bertha’s expressions of almost child-like delight are undercut by irony, and dread for what you know she will discover before the evening is over. It’s often said that the ending of a short story should feel “surprising yet inevitable”, and ‘Bliss’ provides a classic example of this at work.

First published in English Review, vol. 27, in 1918. Widely collected, including in Strange Bliss: Essential Stories, Pushkin Press, 2021. Available to read online via the the Katherine Mansfield society

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield is the superlative modern writer of childhood. Her child characters are not saccharine or tragic, overtly sentimental or unscrupulous. Instead, they are curious, in both senses of the word. This story dramatises relationships between children that are cruelly defined by social class. The well-off Burnells aren’t allowed to speak to the Kelveys, the fatherless daughters of a washerwoman. But the arrival of a doll’s house that is “too marvellous” allows a moment of connection. The house is the talk of the school playground; “four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow”. But the object that Kezia (the heroine of many Mansfield stories) adores, “the little lamp”, prompts her to break the rules to show the house to the Kelveys. What I love about the story is the use of the little or the tiny – the replica lamp that looks like it could be lit – to convey not cuteness but the complexity of aesthetic pleasure. The lamp becomes an emblem of the sudden, devastating insight that anyone can have no matter their social standing.

First published in The Nation or Athenaeum, 1922, collected in The Doves Nest and Other Stories and available online here

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

At the risk of giving away too much information, a small 1950s edition of A Dove’s Nest my wife picked up in Hay-on-Wye an age ago is on the windowsill of the downstairs loo along with some other essentials like a Claire Keegan book and The Penguin Book of Exorcisms. Mansfield has lingered with me for a few years, but only recently, partly because her story reflects something of Dorothy Edwards (and of course, Woolf, with whom Mansfield had a complex respectful rivalry). I am consistently astounded at how modern Mansfield’s voice remains – she was the consummate modernist, I guess. She is forthright, fearless, and exceedingly good company. I love that Virginia Woolf just couldn’t keep away from her. I don’t think Woolf particularly liked her, but she was compelled to be in her presence, to discuss writing with her, to explore that mind of hers. Mansfield was a New Zealander, and I think it’s important to remember something I heard Eleanor Catton once say about the psychology of the New Zealand writer, that people just don’t realise how isolated a place it is, and how far away from their closest neighbours they are. That has an effect in many ways, but particularly on how a writer views the world. Mansfield was, as the experts would have it, an adventuress, and her life story is even more brilliant in its colours of passion and intensity than the fiction she dedicated herself to. As her death encroached (she probably caught her tuberculosis from DH Lawrence) she wrote incessantly, and ‘The Doll’s House’ comes from this period. It is a great example of that voice I am so enraptured by. It is lively, funny, it cuts you dead with its swagger. I just love being around it.

First published in The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, Middleton Murry, 1923, and widely collected. Available to read on the Katherine Mansfield Society website, here

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield had to be on this list, there are so many short stories of hers I could list as favourites. Mansfield was a firm favourite of my grandmother, who was keen to point out many times that, like me, Mansfield moved from New Zealand to London in her twenties. Now that I’m 34 I hope the comparison ends there. ‘At the Bay’ was the story I initially thought of including, it is the first story in a treasured copy of The Garden Party and Other Stories that my mum gave me, which belonged to her, with her name and the year 1973 written on the title page. I own a handful of short story collections with Katherine Mansfield in them including Persephone’s beautiful The Montana Stories and not one of them has the story I ended up choosing. The thing is, ‘Bliss’ has been rattling around in my brain ever since I read it. Mansfield has captured longing perfectly as well as that first pinprick when one realises a betrayal. It is a sublime story, and like Virginia Woolf, I think Mansfield is the greatest modernist writer.

First published in the English Review, 1918, now in Selected Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002, and other Mansfield collections, including Strange Bliss, 2021 Pushkin Press. Available to read online here

‘The Man Without Temperament’ by Katherine Mansfield

Mansfield is able to do things with pace that I’ve not experienced with any other writer. The best of her stories simmer along for a few pages and then a final few words will suddenly pull everything into a tight knot.

As with much of her fiction, on the first page it’s not quite clear where you are or who is present, or there is some kind of presumption that you already know this place, you’ve been living there for years. A man is standing at a door “turning the ring, turning the heavy signet ring upon his little finger”, and then, amongst a placeless assortment of people, another hand enters the scene, “A hand, like a leaf, [falls] on his shoulder.” The dynamics of anxiousness and frailty, captured in a subtle series of gestures and perspectival shifts, carry through right to the cool aggression of the final line, and there we find a husband unable to reconcile memories of romance with caring for his now sick wife.

First published as ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ in Art and Letters, vol.3, no.2, Spring 1920. Collected in Bliss and Other Stories, Constable, 1920. Now widely available, including in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2008

‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield

A story for May

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at–nothing–at nothing, simply.

The pure joy captured here in the beginning, and throughout the piece, is spellbinding, especially as later it’s replaced with a darker set of feelings.

At the heart of the story is “a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky.” I love short stories that take an image and hold it up to the light, show it from different angles, and allow it to take on different meanings as the narrative progresses. The tree is initially a symbol of the springtime’s abundance, then of youth, of hidden desires, and finally of loss and the passage of time.

First published in the English Review (1918), now in Selected Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2002, and other Mansfield collections, available online here