Although Katherine Mansfield is best known as a writer of short stories, she also wrote poems and book reviews, which were collected and edited posthumously by her second husband, John Middleton Murry. She once began a novel, and several fragments of plays have survived. She left a considerable amount of personal documents; their bulk greatly exceeds that of her published work. Murry edited the Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927; “Definitive Edition,” 1954), The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1928), The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939), and Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922 (1951).

Although extravagant claims have been made for her, many critics insist that Mansfield’s achievements were modest. She completed no novel, and, although she wrote about a hundred stories, her fame rests on no more than a dozen. Yet, in any age, her stories would be remarkable for their precise and evocative descriptions, their convincing dialogue, their economy and wit, and their dazzling insights into the shifting emotions of their characters.

In her own age, she was a pioneer. She and James Joyce are often credited with creating the modern short story. Though this claim may be an exaggeration, her stories did without the old-fashioned overbearing author-narrators, the elaborate settings of scenes, and the obvious explanations of motives and themes of earlier fiction. Instead, she provided images and metaphors, dialogues and monologues with little in between. Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), her stories seem to have had their nonpoetic dross deleted.

Her stories have influenced such writers as Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter, and Christopher Isherwood; the standard “New Yorker story” owes much to her. Most important, many decades after her death, her stories are read with pleasure.

Exemplify Katherine Mansfield’s use of objective correlative.

Contrast the use of epiphanies by Mansfield and James Joyce.

Why does Bertha in “Bliss” suddenly desire her husband?

What principle or principles govern the structure of Mansfield’s episodes in “At the Bay”?

What does Laura come to understand in “The Garden Party”: the lower class, death, her own values, other matters, a combination of things?

To what extent do the concerns of Mansfield’s young women characters resemble those of Virginia Woolf?