This Norton Critical Edition includes thirty-five of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories with explanatory annotations.
With the exception of the first four stories, all were written within a period of ten years. These stories, and the letters following, reflect the urgency of a writer who knew her time was limited. All but four of the texts of the stories reprinted here are versions that Mansfield herself revised or selected.
Twenty excerpts from Mansfield’s correspondence address the craft of writing and her own views on her work, subjects rarely broached in her many letters.
"Criticism" includes eighteen essays that collectively suggest the changing emphases in how Mansfield has been read by critics. Contributors include fellow writers Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Frank O’ Connor, as well as biographers Claire Tomalin and Vincent O’Sullivan, among others.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
"The most emblematic woman writer of her time." - Patricia Hampl, New York Times Book Review
"One of the results of Miss Mansfield's poetic temperament is that beauty is the general condition of her story." - Rebecca West, New Statesman
"The secret of this legerdemain is simply in Miss Mansfield's mastery of local colour, of twinkling circumstance, of the inflection of the moment. It is the song of a sensibility ecstatically aware of the surfaces of life." - Conrad Aiken
"[Mansfield] was magnificent in her objective view of things, her real sensitiveness to climate, mental or physical, her genuinely first-rate equipment in the matter of the five senses." - Katherine Anne Porter, Nation.
