Though dealing in both the imagined and given worlds of isolated and lonely figures, she never would have risked on paper a climax as dramatic as her own. In her exploration of the human condition, Mansfield is most effective in her treatment of the sudden revelations of everyday life, frequently those experienced by women and children. In actual life, however, their marriage endured through all the difficulties they had to face, even after Mansfield clearly was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis. In “The Man Without a Temperament,” she creates a reunion in which the husband, outwardly attentive to the needs of his wife’s illness, lives inwardly altogether in their past. Her health always precarious, Mansfield spent most of her winters on the Continent, leading to frequent separations from Murry. Whatever your decision, the stories of the two show striking similarities at times, with the New Zealand upstart frequently the leader in experiment. of an interesting mind.” After listening to Harris’ sympathetic reading here, you are free to make your own judgment, and perhaps suspect that something as uncool as jealousy, from the point of view of the Bloomsbury Group, might be involved. Mansfield confided to Murry that she felt Woolf’s “Night and Day” “a lie in the soul,” and Woolf said of “Bliss,” one of Mansfield’s treatments of the intelligentsia, that “the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision. A friendship with Virginia Woolf started out promisingly only to end in mutually wary dislike. Never entirely comfortable in the established literary circles of London, Mansfield was both attracted to their members and at the same time felt socially insecure among them as well as critical of their work. 7, Leslie was killed in action, and Katherine deliberately turned to writing about their early family life in New Zealand, ultimately producing three of her greatest stories: “Prelude,” “At the Bay” and “The Garden Party,” all included in this collection. The brother brought back to his sister both happy and not so happy memories of their childhood. Another turning point in Mansfield’s life came with World War I, when her younger brother Leslie arrived in London during February of 1915 to join his regiment. She and Murry spent the winter of 1913-14 in Paris, where she wrote her first long story, “Something Childish but Very Natural,” a delicate, dreamlike treatment of an adolescent love affair, tenderly read here by Rosemary Harris. In the following year she met and began living with John Middleton Murry, an eccentric critic and editor, whom she was to marry in 1918 after her divorce from Bowden. Following a miscarriage, she returned to London and began publishing seriously in the New Age, a socialist journal.Īfter living briefly with her husband, she left him again, had an abortion in the spring of 1911 after another affair, and published her first collection, “In a German Pension,” most of its harsh, satiric material based on her Bavarian stay. They led her to the discovery of her true bent, giving her a form and a technique to handle the sudden flashes of perception that characterized her earliest work.

By May, she was pregnant by another man, a Polish musician, and retreated to Bavaria, where she first read a selection of Chekov’s stories, in German translation. Married on March 2, 1909, to George Bowden, 11 years her senior, she left him on the following day. She already had begun to publish brief sketches and finally persuaded her father to give her a small allowance that let her return in 1908 to London and the free-spirited life that she was determined to experience. Sent in 1903 to Queen’s College, London, by her upper-middle-class parents-her father was a successful banker-she learned something of the larger world during the next three years and returned reluctantly to her home only on the insistence of her family. Mansfield’s work is so closely linked to her own life that at times it is impossible to separate them. They are read perceptively in a sensitive variety of voices by Rosemary Harris, who won an Emmy for the role of George Sand in Masterpiece Theatre’s “Notorious Woman” and a Tony for her portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine in “A Lion in Winter.” This collection of 15 unabridged titles has been skillfully chosen to show her development from her first experiments to her final triumphs.

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield, as she chose to call herself as a writer, became one of the shapers of the modern short story.

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