Katherine Mansfield

Author profile

born

October 14, 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand

died

January 09, 1923

gender

female

website

http://www.katherinemansfield.com/

genre

Literature & Fiction, Short Stories

influences

Anton Chekhov

About this author

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Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.

Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T S Elliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the bril...more Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.

Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T S Elliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.

Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.

Mnsfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.

Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering and the inevitabilty of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.

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Books by Katherine Mansfield

Average rating: 3.95 · 3,298 ratings · 343 reviews · 127 distinct works

	The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Lorna Sage (Editor) 3.93 avg rating — 1,078 ratings — published 1922 — 77 editions	My rating:
	Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Jeffrey Meyers (Introduction) 4.24 avg rating — 343 ratings — published 1920 — 6 editions	My rating:
	The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield 4.24 avg rating — 376 ratings — published 1945 — 19 editions	My rating:
	Bliss & Other Stories 4.11 avg rating — 209 ratings — published 1922 — 28 editions	My rating:
	In a German Pension: 13 Stories 3.83 avg rating — 166 ratings — published 1911 — 31 editions	My rating:
	Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield, Ursula Grawe 3.62 avg rating — 105 ratings — published 1920	My rating:
	Selected Stories 3.96 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1953 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, William Boyd (Foreword by) 4.28 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 2005	My rating:
	Katherine Mansfield's Selected Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Vincent O'Sullivan (Editor) 3.84 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 1983 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Something Childish But Very Natural 3.52 avg rating — 58 ratings — published 1983 — 4 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Katherine Mansfield

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

99 people liked it

“Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others… Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”
― Katherine Mansfield

85 people liked it

“The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
― Katherine Mansfield

tags: life-experience

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Katherine Mansfield

Author profile

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Quotes by Katherine Mansfield

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combine editions
Books by Katherine Mansfield