She might not be as nationalistic as some might want her to be, but, at the level of language, there is something very distinctive and personal, transcendent, about her writing style and accomplishment that marks her out as special in the same way as Patricia Grace is special, Keri Hulme is special and Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall looks like she is going to be special.”Īfter reading the stories certain themes stand out as recurrent across her work: the awkward and often horrifying cusp between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience class and inequality death and loss lust crushing disappointment the restricted lives of women childbearing the slippery, strange, surprising territory of the mind. “I sometimes play this game: if Katherine Mansfield was a young unknown today and walked into a New Zealand publishing house with a 2023 version of In A German Pension (1911), would it be accepted? I think so. And some of her stories are among New Zealand’s, let alone the world’s, best. On Mansfield’s influence, Witi Ihimaera (who this year celebrates 50 years as a published writer) says: “Māori say we should always put the past before us so, for short story writers, Katherine Mansfield should always have a place in the whakapapa of short fiction. A scan through the timeline of the major turns in her short life (she died aged 34) reveals an individual who refused to conform and who committed her brief time to making art and having as many experiences as she could squeeze in.
But re-visiting her life and work in this centenary year I’m reminded that Katherine Mansfield was a punk.
I have tedious memories of reading At the Bay in high school and not really “getting” it.
I read all of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.Ĭonfession: I haven’t always been a fan. To mark 100 years since the great short story writer’s death, books editor Claire Mabey marathonned her collected works – these are the top 20.
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