The Sigla Blog

When one of my favourite writers, Virginia Woolf said: “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of”, I couldn’t help my curiosity about Katherine Mansfield. Finally, the opportunity to read her work arrived and I’m sorry I’ve waited so long to discover it. Mansfield has long occupied a place on my ‘to read’ list and her weighty reputation rests on her short stories. Born in 1888, Mansfield avoided writing novels and made the short story her oeuvre. Her middle class background provided the setting for many of her stories and mortality - perhaps due to the tuberculosis that killed her at 34 - dominate her writing. The merit in Mansfield’s writing is not found in trawling through what happens in individual stories, but in collectively assessing the themes. Despite the brevity of the stories themselves, the impact of her writing on me was huge. For no particular reason, I started with ‘Bliss’, an unforgettable story of infidelity and desire. Mansfield drags us into her characters heads, revealing their interior thought processes and kicking off her lifelong exploration of ‘the secret self. ‘Bliss’ brings to mind Virginia Woolf, as does ‘Sun and Moon’, with the stream-of-consciousness delivery of Mrs. Dalloway. There is a peripheral approach to the way both writers speak to the reader. The characters behave straightforwardly enough but the real issues take place on the outskirts of the story, visible just out of the corner of the reader’s eye.

Mansfield has a unique ability to arrest the reader and it’s rare to read a short story that you immediately want to reread upon finishing it. In ‘A Married Man’s Story’ and ‘The Wind Blows’, Mansfield supplies the basic outline and we are given a very wide berth of interpretation. In constantly using this open-ended, ambiguous technique, Mansfield engages the reader in a deliberate game of interactivity.

While Woolf’s feminism (in her novels anyway) was subtly interlarded with other themes, Mansfield is more pronounced in her handling of it. In ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends A Wedding’, an unhappy wife hemmed into a mundane, thankless existence attends a wedding and instead of joy, finds only more reinforcement of her own unhappiness. Frau Brechenmacher pities the bride “in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom”. Mansfield’s probing of “women’s self-fashioned chains of slavery” echoes Woolf’s view that a woman, in order to write, (where writing is a metaphor for personal freedom), “needs a room of [one’s] own and one hundred pounds a year”. The theme of domesticity as paralysis is recurrent and in ‘At The Bay’ a male characters thinks there’s something amiss with Beryl just because she forgets to put sugar in his tea. In ‘Prelude’, the same Beryl is adamant that she will never be “content to sit in the sun and shell peas” like her mother and yet as the story closes, we are left with a portrait of her as the miserable, unmarried aunt. Many of Mansfield’s characters, regardless of gender, exist in a bubble of longing. Personal loneliness and discontent are never far away while philosophically, the sheer emptiness of existence is consistently addressed. Laura tries to find meaning in it all at the end of ‘The Garden Party’, stammering, “Isn’t life. Isn’t life.” but she can’t finish the sentence. In keeping with the proprietary patriarchy of the day, her brother Laurie assumes that he understands her meaning and claims the sentence, finishing it for her.

The writing occupies the same realm of modernism as William Faulkner, DH Lawrence, Joyce and of course, Woolf. Where it’s most apparent is in language and form. Words are repeated, phrases reappear and the same characters feature in several stories. Such is the intensity of her writing, there is no room for flippancy with words that aren’t needed. Mansfield experiments with form and ends her stories in the strangest places, as in ‘Millie’ and ‘The Wind Blows’. This extends to the story titles, which often have little to do with what happens, leading to a kind of narrative ventriloquism meant to point the reader in another direction. In ‘The Garden Party’, the actual party is never described. The heart of the story is about death as a leveller with the garden as a metaphor for heaven.

Class is another theme never far from her work, from a snobbish ex-lover in ‘A Dill Pickle’ to the cruel treatment of the indigent Kelvey children in ‘The Doll’s House’. They may be lower class but they have an unspoken, unuttered bond and “never failed to understand each other” in a way the upper class Burnell children don’t. Mansfield’s only brother, who she was incredibly close to, was killed in the First World War, leaving her heartbroken. This key relationship may explain the constant examination of sibling relationships in her writing. She brilliantly captures children and her most vivid characters - from the overlooked, jealous sibling in ‘Sun and Moon’ to the sensitive Laura in ‘The Garden Party’ - are kids.

Having been swamped by novels over the last few months, it was a relief to read something where plot was definitely not the focus. In ‘Psychology’, a character asks, “How sure are you that psychology quo psychology has got anything to do with literature at all?” These stories delve into the deepest and saddest parts of the human psyche and it is only because of Mansfield’s subtlety that they don’t become polemical or preachy. Like her American counterpart Flannery O’Connor, Mansfield is one of the best short story writers you could ever hope to read.

Related: “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?�