October 16th, 2005
“Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?”
The woman responsible for that quote is, along with Flannery O’Connor, one of the greatest short story writers ever. On Friday, it was Katherine Mansfield’s birthday and I had intended to post something about her on the day. The reason I didn’t, was time, work, the usual, but mostly because I wanted to go back and reread one of her stories before I did. The email for Friday from The Writer’s Almanac seemed acutely timed as I was racing to finish a short short story (still unfinished) for my writer’s group this week. What better inspiration (or intimidation?) than to read ‘The Garden Party’ again.
I had long heard of Mansfield. Virginia Woolf, another of my favourite writers, claimed that Mansfield was the only writer whose work she was jealous of. Like Woolf, Mansfield also tackled feminism but was far more combative in her approach. In one of the most memorable scenes in a story called ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends A Wedding’, an unhappy woman pities a young 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”, who she feels will find only routine and thanklessness in marriage.
Until earlier this year, I had only read one of her stories, Bliss, a terse, haunting tale about infidelity which stayed with me for years. When it came to my turn to pick a bookclub book, I decided to ditch the usual choice of a novel and risk a book of short stories. Thankfully it paid off and my fellow femmes were also converted.
For anyone interested in short stories, or writing, she is a must-read exponent of the genre. A few months back, I wrote a piece about her having devoured those stories. Her reputation is enough to make anyone curious, but this snippet from The Writer’s Almanac paints a picture of an outsider, albeit a gregarious one, which, if I hadn’t read her, would pique my interest.
“She became one of the wildest bohemians in New Zealand. She had affairs with men and women, lived with Aborigines, and published scandalous stories. She moved back to London and lived in the bohemian scene there. At one point, she married a man she barely knew, and left him before the wedding night was over because she couldn’t stand the pink bedspread.”