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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 · 60,992 ratings · 6,525 reviews · 983 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Garden Party and Other Stories 3.82 avg rating — 10,558 ratings — published 1922 — 17 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 — 2,962 ratings — published 1945 — 21 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 3.71 avg rating — 3,162 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 — 2,724 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 — 2,395 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 — 1,866 ratings — published 1918 — 20 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 — 1,608 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 3.64 avg rating — 1,226 ratings — published 1911 — 201 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 — 1,031 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 — 896 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

3093 likes

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

2483 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

970 likes

See all Katherine Mansfield's quotes »

Polls

March 2025 Short Story/Novella Poll

The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin

38 votes, 24.2%

Queenie: A story by Alice Munro

28 votes, 17.8%

The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving

18 votes, 11.5%

Bliss from The Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield

17 votes, 10.8%

Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

12 votes, 7.6%

Mimsy Were The Borogoves by Lewis Padgett

12 votes, 7.6%

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

11 votes, 7.0%

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories title story by Sandra Cisneros

10 votes, 6.4%

The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue

6 votes, 3.8%

Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter

5 votes, 3.2%

157 total votes

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