Book description
Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen
stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically
short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in
England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken,
half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the
blackly comic 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', and the short, sharp
sketch 'Miss Brill', in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self
is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family
life in 'At the Bay'. 'All that I write,' Mansfield said, 'all that I am
- is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.' Born in New
Zealand in 1888, Kathering Mansfield Beauchamp was primarily a writer of
short stories. She published Prelude and The Garden Party and Other
Stories before her premature death from TB in 1923. One more book
(Something Childish) and her journal and letters were published
posthumously.
