Book description
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when
she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the
pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it
again, or to stand still and laugh at nothing at nothing, simply.
Katherine Mansfield s perceptive and resonant writing helped to define
the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create
quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. In these three tales,
aglow with light and colour, Mansfield describes an exultant epiphany,
fading memories and the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up
everyday existence. This book includes Bliss, The Daughters of the Late
Colonel and The Doll's House. Katherine Mansfield was born in
Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She
came to London for the latter part of her education and settled in
Europe. Her first writing was published in The New Age, to which she
became a regular contributor. Her first book, In a German Pension, was
published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John
Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. She was a conscious
modernist, an experimenter in life and writing, and mixed with others of
her kind, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. With 'Prelude' in
1916 she evolved her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction. By
1917 she had contracted tuberculosis, and from that time led a wandering
life in search of health. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was
published in 1921, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year
later. After her death in 1923, two more collections of stories were
published, also her Letters and later her Journal.
