Six Katherine Mansfield Stories You Need to Read

“The only contemporary writer Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of,” New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield “is one of the greatest short story writers of all time,” Catherine Dent writes for Canada-based humanities-focused site, The Collector, recommending six “you need to read.”

“It is for her short fiction that [Mansfield] is best remembered now as one of the leading writers of the early twentieth century,” Dent writes, who selects “Germans at Meat”, “The Woman at the Store”, “The Garden Party”, “Bliss”, “Psychology” and “Prelude”.

“Mansfield pioneered a new vision for English short fiction that was influenced by French and Russian writers, and, in doing so, she brought the English short story up to par with its twentieth-century continental counterparts. Her writing is vivid, immersive, and innovative – as the short stories listed above, and many others, attest.”

Claire Harman’s book All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, published this year, is suggested as further reading.

Original article by Catherine Dent, The Collector, September 3, 2023.