'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.
