Wild Places: Selected Stories

Description

A gorgeous hardback of Katherine Mansfield's best stories, selected by her biographer Claire Harman A beautiful new hardback edition of Katherine Mansfield's most vivid and distinctive stories. Katherine Mansfield was the only writer Virginia Woolf envied. Mansfield transformed the short story genre with her work, creating stories miraculous in their intensity yet seemingly so simple. The shift of a heart, the beat of a moment, the changing of the light- in these stories emotional universes are contained within glimpses. Mansfield only lived to the age of 34 but in that time wrote stories true to her indomitable spirit. A hundred years on from her death, Mansfield's biographer, Claire Harman, has created this new selection to show us the master of the short story form in full flight. WITH A FOREWORD BY HELEN SIMPSON AND INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE HARMAN 'There is something rapturous about her work...she has the power to distil the apparently inconsequential into frozen moments laden with significance' Guardian 'Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people' Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888. She spent most of her adult life in Europe where she became a pioneer of the modernist movement along with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Her short stories influenced many contemporaries and were instrumental in the development of the form. Mansfield's personal life was highly unconventional including love affairs with both men and women, intense friendships and travel. The last five years of her life were overshadowed by tuberculosis though she produced some of her best work during this time including the publication of the collections Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). She died in France in 1923 at the age of just 34.

Predating Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Mansfield's late stories...transformed the short story genre by casting a fleeting, impressionist glance at the ordinary details of domestic existence * Paris Review * Her economy, the boldness of her comic gift, her speed, her dramatic changes of the point of interest, her power to dissolve and reassemble a character and situation by a few lines -- V S Pritchett, 1946 * New Statesman * 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'...perhaps her greatest achievement, describes two spinsters whose overbearing father has just died. It flickers between comedy, menace, outlandish interludes and engulfing sorrow with consummate skill * Guardian * She was not a kind or gentle writer. ['The Doll's House'] could be sentimental in the hands of a lesser writer, but she knew better than that. She spares nobody -- Margaret Drabble * Guardian * There is something rapturous about her work: through her acute eye and cool, appraising descriptions, she has the power to distil the apparently inconsequential into frozen moments laden with significance * Guardian *