The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915

by Katherine Mansfield, Gerri Kimber (Editor), Vincent O'Sullivan (Editor)

Overview

The resurgence of interest in Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) in recent years has grown to the extent that she is now perceived as 'the most emblematic woman writer of her time'. Mansfield researchers have been frequently frustrated by the lack of a complete edition of her fiction. There are several editions of her stories in print, but these omit many pieces not already collected and published in the volumes edited by Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry after her death, from which present 'collected' editions derive.This Edinburgh edition of her stories, published to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of her death in 1923, is a truly complete collection of the author's fiction writing. The editors have sought to include hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories. Placed in chronological order and fully annotated with clear, concise notes, this edition undertakes a complete remapping of the author's fiction output, from her earliest childhood pieces to the pitch-perfect quality of the mature writer at the height of her craft, thereby redefining Katherine Mansfield as a writer for the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748642748
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Series:	The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield , #1
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 5.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gerri Kimber is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of the book series Katherine Mansfield Studies. As well as the deviser and Series Editor of the 4 vol. Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, she is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and Textual Note; Chronology; Introduction; Fiction 1898–1915; 1898; Enna Blake; 1899; A Happy Christmas Eve; 1901; The Great Examination; 1903; The Pine Tree, The Sparrows, and You and I; Misunderstood; She; A True Tale; ‘It was a big bare house’; ‘I am afraid I must be very old-fashioned’; Two Ideas with One Moral; 1904; Die Einsame (The Lonely One); Your Birthday; One Day; 1905; About Pat; 1906; My Potplants; Les Deux Étrangères; Juliet; ‘I was never happy’, Huia said; Memories; The Tale of the Three; 1907; L’Incendie; Vignette: Summer in Winter; Summer Idyll; Night Came Swiftly; She and the Boy; or the Story of the Funny-Old-Thing; ‘She unpacked her box’; Vignettes; Vignette: Through the Autumn Afternoon; Silhouettes; In a Café; In the Botanical Gardens; Leves Amores; The Story of Pearl Button; Vignette: Sunset Tuesday; ‘On waking next morning’; An Attempt; Vignette: Westminster Cathedral; ‘She sat on the broad window-sill’; The Man, the Monkey and the Mask; 1908; The Education of Audrey; Juliette Delacour; The Unexpected Must Happen; Vignette: By the Sea; In Summer; The Yellow Chrysanthemum; The Thoughtful Child. Her Literary Aspirations; Vignette: They are a ridiculous company; The Thoughtful Child; Rewa; The Tiredness of Rosabel; Study: The Death of a Rose; Youth and Age; Vignette: I look out through the window; Almost a Tragedy: The Cars on Lambton Quay; 1909; A God, One Day on Mount Olympus; ‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’; Prose; His Sister’s Keeper; 1910; The Child-Who-Was-Tired; Germans at Meat; Mary; The Baron; The Luft Bad; At ‘Lehmann’s’; Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding; The Sister of the Baroness; Frau Fischer; A Fairy Story; 1911; A Birthday; The Modern Soul; The Festival of the Coronation; The Journey to Bruges; Being a Truthful Adventure; The Advanced Lady; The Swing of the Pendulum; A Blaze; The Green Tree: A Fairy Story; 1912; A Marriage of Passion; At the Club; The Woman at the Store; Green Goggles; Tales of a Courtyard; How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped; Spring in a Dream; New Dresses; The Little Girl; The House; Old Cockatoo Curl; 1913; Ole Underwood; Epilogue I: Pension Seguin; Millie; Epilogue II; Bains Turcs; Old Tar; Maata; Young Country; Rose Eagle; 1914; Something Childish But Very Natural; KT and her sister; Hydrangeas; ‘There is always something wonderfully touching’; 1915; Brave Love; The Little Governess; The Beautiful Miss Richardson; Spring Pictures; Rough Sketch; An Indiscreet Journey; Autumns: I; Autumns: II; Stay-laces; The Dark Hollow; The Aloe; Appendix A: Plan of Maata; Index of first lines; Index of stories.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This much needed and very welcome work does two important things: It gives us all of Mansfield’s fiction, with useful notes; and it removes many of John Middleton Murry’s intrusions into the stories he edited after Mansfield’s death. We all owe the editors, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, a debt of gratitude for this excellent edition of the work of a major modernist writer."

Professor Robert Scholes, Brown University.

"We owe to her the prosperity of the "free" story,' Elizabeth Bowen said of Katherine Mansfield: 'she untrammelled it from conventions.' Here, at last, is the evidence in full: the edition Mansfield deserves."

Professor David Trotter, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge

Editorial Reviews

The Edinburgh UniversityPress volumes will finally make available, almost a century after her death, a complete, scholarly edition of the collected works of Katherine Mansfield. This, in other words, is an important publishing moment not only for New Zealand literature but for early twentieth-century literary scholarship more generally. And central to this venture are the two volumes of fiction, which themselves constitute a significant step towards the complete and definitive publication of the work of the period’s most original, prolific, and indeed influential short story writer.

The Journal of New Zealand Literature - Andrew Bennett

Kimber and O’Sullivan have created a wonderful and accessible short story collection, which is sure to delight a wealth of readers.

Good Reads Kirsty Hewitt

This much needed and very welcome work does two important things: It gives us all of Mansfield’s fiction, with useful notes; and it removes many of John Middleton Murry’s intrusions into the stories he edited after Mansfield’s death. We all owe the editors, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, a debt of gratitude for this excellent edition of the work of a major modernist writer.

Professor Robert Scholes

Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan have been instrumental in developing the ambitious Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The first two volumes of Mansfield’s Collected Fiction appeared in 2012, covering 1898–1915 and 1916–22 respectively. These are punctiliously edited texts with introductory materials that allow scholars to interpret Mansfield’s dissident difference as an author via ideologies of rootedness versus roaming, her New Zealand upbringing (canvassed recently by Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross in The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction), her colonial anxieties, feminist aesthetics, and tangled, uneasy sexual politics.

The Year's Work in English Studies - Andrew Radford

‘The editors of the collected fiction are unstinting in their attention to detail, dating and biography. Their efforts give us a picture of an artist discovering what it is she wants to do to be different from the rest, to find a story and a way of telling it that will be hers and hers alone.’

London Review of Books - Kirsty Gunn

Kimber and O’Sullivan have produced a work of superb scholarship that is clearly also a labour of love. Their Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, containing every fragment as well as all the finished stories (some rescued from the meddlesome editorial hands of her second husband, John Middleton Murry, and restored to their original state), undeniably establishes her as a great modernist writer.

The Irish Times - Elizabeth Wassell

We owe to her the prosperity of the 'free' story,' Elizabeth Bowen said of Katherine Mansfield: 'she untrammelled it from conventions.' Here, at last, is the evidence in full: the edition Mansfield deserves.

Professor David Trotter