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Katherine Mansfield

Born

in Wellington, New Zealand

October 14, 1888

Died

January 09, 1923

Website

http://www.katherinemansfield.com/

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Short Stories, Classics

Influences

Anton Chekhov ...more

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Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) 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. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associat Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) 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. Eliot, 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.

Mansfield'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 Allan 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 inevitability 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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Combine Editions
Katherine Mansfield’s books

Average rating: 3.75 · 62,313 ratings · 6,728 reviews · 1,031 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Garden Party and Other Stories 3.82 avg rating — 10,735 ratings — published 1922 — 629 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield by Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Arkin (Introduction) 4.14 avg rating — 2,997 ratings — published 1945 — 90 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Garden Party 3.72 avg rating — 3,329 ratings — 83 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield, Ursula Grawe (Editor) 3.60 avg rating — 2,800 ratings — published 1920 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bliss & Other Stories 3.92 avg rating — 2,439 ratings — published 1920 — 195 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bliss 3.71 avg rating — 1,919 ratings — published 1918 — 33 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Angela Smith (Editor) 3.92 avg rating — 1,621 ratings — published 1948 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	In a German Pension: 13 Stories 3.63 avg rating — 1,246 ratings — published 1911 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Garden Party 3.78 avg rating — 1,035 ratings — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Stories 4.18 avg rating — 901 ratings — published 1920 — 46 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Katherine Mansfield…

Quotes by Katherine Mansfield (?)

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

3088 likes

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

2486 likes

“Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.”
― Katherine Mansfield

tags: eyes, happiness, happy-people, holding-hands, love, short-story, smiling

971 likes

See all Katherine Mansfield's quotes »

Polls

September 2015 Short Story Poll

1754, Candide by Voltaire, 94 pages

35 votes, 26.9%

1936, At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, 130 pages

17 votes, 13.1%

1924, A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, 84 pages

14 votes, 10.8%

1905, The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 64 pages

13 votes, 10.0%

1952, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, 109 pages

11 votes, 8.5%

1905, The Game by Jack London, 103 pages

9 votes, 6.9%

1921, The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield, 12 pages

8 votes, 6.2%

1936, Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, 115 pages

7 votes, 5.4%

1943, Chess Story by Stefan Zweig, 84 pages

5 votes, 3.8%

1965,Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories by Flannery O'Connor, 25 pages (Title Story Only)

4 votes, 3.1%

1955, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, 128 pages

3 votes, 2.3%

1890, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, 36 pages

2 votes, 1.5%

1971, Reunion by Fred Uhlman, 96 pages

2 votes, 1.5%

130 total votes

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