Introduction
By the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed
her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the
world’s most admired and respected short story writers.
Mansfield’s third collection, The Garden Party and Other
Stories, attests to her status as a virtuoso of the modernist
short story. Mansfield’s readership has grown enormously in the
more than eighty years since the first publication of The Garden
Party. Her best-known stories, “The Garden Party,”
“Her First Ball,” and “The Daughters of the Late
Colonel,” are widely appreciated and frequently anthologized as
masterpieces of the short story form. One of a handful of writers
whose names have become synonymous with British modernism, Mansfield
was viewed by Virginia Woolf as her most formidable professional rival
and fictionalized by D. H. Lawrence as the independent, artistic
Gudrun Brangwen in his novel Women in Love. After her death
from tuberculosis in 1923 at age thirty-four, her posthumous
reputation was fueled by the tireless (but also self-serving) efforts
of her editor and husband, John Middleton Murry.
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
(1888-1923) adopted the name of Katherine Mansfield when she began to
publish her fiction in 1907. One of the first to benefit when British
institutions of higher education opened to women, she attended
Queen’s College in London. The Wellington of her childhood
appears as a setting in many of her stories although she returned to
her colonial homeland for only two years after leaving Queen’s.
Mansfield’s youth was characterized by many brief but passionate
relationships with women and men. She said of her attraction to
another young woman, “I feel more powerfully all those so-termed
sexual impulses with her than I have with any man.” For reasons
that appear to be related to her sexual adventures, her mother took
her to a Bavarian spa for hydrotherapy in 1909 and cut her daughter
from her will shortly thereafter. Mansfield’s stay ended in a
miscarriage. Mansfield described herself as “a writer first and
a woman after,” and this dedication to her art, along with her
ill health, determined her personal priorities. She married twice,
first in 1909 to the musician G. C. Bowden; she left him immediately,
before consummating the marriage. Mansfield and Bowden did not legally
divorce for eight years, and she finally married Murry in 1918 after a
six-year relationship. Mansfield and Murry often lived separately for
a variety of reasons: the war, personal conflicts, and most notably
her tuberculosis, which led her to seek mild climates and treatment
abroad. Due to her geographical separation from Murry, Mansfield left
a large body of correspondence. Her letters to Murry reveal a loving
though conflicted relationship and her unsuccessful quest for a cure
for her tuberculosis. Toward the end of her life she felt a need for
spiritual development she claimed that “[t]he weakness [is] not
only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be
well,” and she entered the Gurdjieff Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France.
Mansfield is the master of a relatively new genre gaining prominence
during the early part of the twentieth century. Critic T. O.
Beachcroft claims that her name “is inevitably linked with the
emergence of the ‘new’ short story on both sides of the
Atlantic,” and she is “one of its very earliest and most
influential practitioners.” Her stories appeared in avant-garde
periodicals--the New Age, the Atheneum, and
Rhythm--the last edited by Murry, whom Mansfield met when she was
a contributor and eventually joined as an editor. Her first collection
of stories, In a German Pension, was published in 1911.
Mansfield’s fiction began to receive wider recognition with the
publication of her second collection, Bliss, in 1920. The
Garden Party was first published in 1922, now viewed a banner year
for breakthrough texts of modernism: James Joyce’s
Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia
Woolf’s Jacob’s Room also appeared that year. Don
W. Kleine explains that Mansfield’s “strategies of
flashback, dream image, interior monologue, and, above all, an
exquisite verbal equivalent of fleeting mental nuances represent an
innovative originality.” Although Mansfield was an innovator,
she is perhaps even more significant as a cultivator who refined the
modernist short story into its finest embodiment of subtle perfection.
Many of Mansfield’s stories, including the near novella-length
“Prelude,” are autobiographical family portraits. In this
volume, “The Garden Party,” “At the Bay,” and
“The Voyage” focus on her childhood experiences. The
stories of The Garden Party demonstrate that, whatever her
subject matter, Mansfield’s contribution to the short story
genre is inseparable from her role as an early and experimental
modernist. Her stories depart from the conventions of
nineteenth-century fiction: They often contain little or no exposition
and the progression of the story may be nonlinear. Gillian Boddy
asserts that in “moving away from the concept of the short story
as a narrative and. . .suggesting. . .the immense possibilities of
what could be done once the artificialities of conventional plot were
eliminated, K. M. had a profound influence on the development of the
modern short story.” Two of her most highly respected
stories--“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and “At
the Bay”--are organized by numbered, nonchronological sections,
what one critic terms the “twelve-cell structure,” and
finds to be “her most distinctive contribution to the form of
the modernist short story.” Similar to Joyce and Woolf,
modernist stream-of-consciousness writers, Mansfield sometimes effaces
the narrator and shifts point of view from character to character. The
reader’s role is instrumental in this kind of fiction--in
discovering the background or “back story” as the work
unfolds and in linking the various characters’ perspectives into
a coherent whole.
Mansfield’s narratives, characterized by their economy, often
use an epitomizing detail–a small, telling stroke that
introduces a moment of profound irony or a joyous epiphany.
Mansfield’s distinct trademark is her cultivation of exquisitely
crafted endings; many of her stories terminate with a perfect moment
of subtle revelation. Although they cannot be called surprise endings
because plot is de-emphasized in her fiction--she shuns momentous
revelations of action or plot, and suspense is missing altogether--she
often concludes with an epiphany. Her use of such a moment has been
compared to “not just Chekhov but to O. Henry.” For
instance, in “Her First Ball” the naive Leila encounters a
momento mori when an elderly man dances with her and reminds
her that she too will get old and die. Yet she quickly turns her back
on this grim epiphany, absorbed in youthful joy in the dance, caught
in the momentum of youthful joie de vivre.
Mansfield’s subject matter is understated, never
sensationalistic. Her characters are ordinary people, outwardly
unassuming. Readers often see and know more than her characters, but
the superiority of the reader is tempered–or burdened–with
empathy and compassion. Dramatic irony is thus another technique
Mansfield brings to perfection. Some of her work might be
characterized as dark comedy, particularly those stories in which the
characters are grotesques whose actions are both poignant and
ridiculous, comic and horrendous. Mansfield admired T. S.
Eliot’s poems, and Kleine places her in the post-Romantic
tradition of writers who depict “the wasted, unrealized
life” of characters such as a J. Alfred Prufrock.
Critics have found that Mansfield’s early training in music
influenced her story form; she studied cello but was discouraged by
her father from becoming a professional musician. However, Mansfield
acted as an extra in several films, and Hubert Zapf notes the way her
work emulates techniques of time-lapse camera. Her technique is
cinematic in other ways–visual as well as auditory. Her best
stories demonstrate mastery of juxtaposition, pacing, timing, and
compression–techniques of rhythm and composition often
associated with film. One of her most original contributions is the
outward visual projection of a character’s inner thoughts. In
“The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” first published in
the London Mercury and “much admired,” the titular
daughters’ lives are so merged that they have a simultaneous
vision of a Ceylonese courier: “Both paused to watch a black man
in white linen drawers running through the pale fields for dear
life.” Yet Mansfield also signals the sisters’ individual
imaginations as Josephine pictures a “tiny” man, who
“scurried along glistening like an ant.” Her sister
Constantia envisions a “tall, thin fellow” who is “a
very unpleasant person indeed.” Similarly, in “Mr. and
Mrs. Dove” the lovesick suitor Reggie, immediately
“sees” his rival. When his beloved Anne says she cannot
marry a man she laughs at (i.e., Reggie), “it seemed to Reggie
that a tall, handsome, brilliant stranger stepped in front of him and
took his place. . . .”
Mansfield has often been called the “English Chekhov” but
she might as aptly be termed a twentieth-century Jane Austen. An
inheritor of Austen’s barbed yet sympathetic irony, Mansfield
dissects social class and the psychology of class distinctions.
Characters make decisions and enact social class prejudices of which
they do not seem fully cognizant. Mansfield shares Austen’s
ironic approach and her themes--social class conflict and the
initiation of young women are crucial to both writers--but she also
adapts many of her predecessor’s techniques. Although she often
uses indirect discourse and creates ironic depictions of
characters’ foibles, social interactions, and small talk, her
treatment is uniquely modern. The initiation stories chart a more
complex development than a simple maturation from innocence to
experience. Critics, for example, cannot agree upon an interpretation
of the ending of “The Garden Party.” The youthful,
upper-class protagonist, Laura Sheridan, experiences some kind of
epiphany in her visit to the dead laborer’s cottage on the day
of her family’s perfect party. In a work by a lesser genius,
Laura might simply encounter mortality or the reality of social class
structure in which the rich give parties while the laborers die doing
their jobs. Critics have viewed the story as archetypal and mythic, a
fairy tale with a twist, but there is no consensus about the nature of
Laura’s experience. As Jayne Marek points out, the story
“involves more than an adolescent’s personal epiphany or a
clever critique of upper-class complacency.” Mansfield’s
own explanation of this story is often quoted as an interpretation.
She claimed that it was about “[t]he diversity of life and how
we try to fit in everything, Death included. That is bewildering for a
person of Laura’s age.” Mansfield’s comment speaks
to the complexity of her protagonist’s experience, and
critics’ identification of the archetypical dimensions of the
story are suggestive, yet the actual effect of the story exceeds any
summary of it. Whatever Mansfield’s intentions, the story ends
with a perfectly poised ambiguity which does not reveal whether Laura
is inarticulate because she lacks insight and maturity or because the
experience she has had is beyond words, beyond articulation.
Mansfield is also, like Austen, a woman writer whose feminism is
disputed because irony makes her position ambiguous. Mansfield’s
chief biographer quotes from a letter in which Mansfield said “I
could not be a suffragette” and concludes that she was not
“an incipient feminist.” But even as a young women she
complained about the options available to women: “I am keen upon
all women having a definite future. . . . The idea of sitting
still and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting.”
Accordingly, Kate Fullbrook finds that “[t]he ideology in
Katherine Mansfield’s early writing is decidedly and overtly
feminist.” Mansfield depicts unmarried women with sympathy and
satire because of their tragi-comic plight in a society that allows
them few options. Some of her most notable stories feature unmarried
women. “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” for example,
was inspired by the plight of Mansfield’s long-time companion,
Ida Constance Baker, whom she called “L.M.” or Lesley
Moore. The terrifying Colonel of the story was derived from
Baker’s father, an Indian Army Doctor. In “The Singing
Lesson” a woman destined for spinsterhood accepts a marriage
proposal with joy though the story has revealed that she is accepting
a false happiness with a man who will only give her a
“little” love. Mansfield’s ironic treatment creates
distance which produces an implied social criticism.
Mansfield’s treatment of women’s limited lives is not
consistently ironic, however. In some stories her treatment is
poignant rather than comic, though always eschewing sentimentality.
For instance, “Life of Ma Parker,” based on a charwoman
she herself employed in 1911 while living at Clovelly Mansions in
Gray’s Inn Road, depicts the dignified and courageous grief of a
woman who has borne thirteen children and lost seven of them, yet can
find no place to have a good cry over the death of her grandson. The
genius of the story resides in Mansfield’s proportion and
emphasis. Ma Parker expects so little, yet she is denied even one
moment in private to grieve. In “The Lady’s Maid,”
the protagonist (perhaps based on Mansfield’s loyal friend, Ida
Baker) refuses marriage in order to remain with her employer. The
titular “Miss Brill” is a voyeur who lives vicariously by
eavesdropping on conversations. Watching people in the park as if they
were actors on a stage, she overhears a couple making fun of her and
her fox fur cries in a displacement of her own inarticulate sorrow.
The strong influence of Chekhov on Mansfield’s stories resulted
in posthumous charges of plagiarism. However, Ronald Sutherland points
out that Mansfield’s early work bears her “distinguishing
characteristics” even before she had read Chekhov’s work.
Her reading of Theocritus, who wrote over two thousand years before
the emergence of modernism, provides an even more unlikely influence.
T. O. Beachcroft nevertheless demonstrates that Theocritus’
fifteenth Idyll provides “an almost perfect model of the short
realistic story that is intended for reading and reveals itself
without a personal narrator” and that the notion of the story as
a small visual picture “continued to dwell in her mind and to
influence her.” In her short life, Mansfield made an enormous
contribution to an emerging genre that grew to prominence in the
twentieth-century. Had she lived longer, she might have finished one
of her novels (she also wrote poems and diaries) or turned her
innovation in different directions. We can never know if Mansfield
reached her full potential, but the stories of The Garden Story
epitomize her contribution as a writer who had already reached
professional maturity at the time of her premature death.
Lynette Felber is a specialist in British literature of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author of Literary
Liaisons: Auto/biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women’s
Fiction (2002) and Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The
British Roman Fleuve (1995), she is Professor of English at
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, and Editor-in-Chief
of Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of
History.