The Montana Stories: no. 25 (Persephone book) - Softcover

Mansfield, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903155150 ISBN 13: 9781903155158

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

Eighty years ago, at the end of May 1921, Katherine Mansfield came to Switzerland, to live at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana (now Crans-Montana) in Switzerland. She was 32 and seriously ill with tuberculosis (possibly caught, according to her biographer Claire Tomalin from DH Lawrence). The next few months were to be the most fruitful period of her life; she did not have much time left to her.

The Montana Stories is a new edition compiled and edited by Persephone Books of everything Katherine Mansfield wrote between July 1921 and the end of January 1922 when she went to Paris for medical treatment. For completeness there are also the two stories and an unfinished fragment that she wrote after she left Montana and before her death in January 1923; but the large proportion of her output during her final working months was written in the chalet shown on the frontispiece of the book.

Physically Katherine Mansfield was in Montana, lying either in bed or on a chair on the balcony; in her imagination she was in London, in the South of France and, in particular, in the New Zealand of her girlhood. It was as if the view over the mountains was a catalyst that gave the impetus to her writing.
She had of course written many short stories before, and had published two volumes of these, but as a collection The Montana Stories has a unique quallity which inevitably owes something to her ill-health. 'The surface of these stories is calm and even bright,' wrote Claire Tomalin, 'but their theme is mortality, and even the joy in them is like Keats' joy, "whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu"; and it is this precariousness which gives them their stinging clarity.' Apart from Keats the closest parallel is in music - the last pieces for piano written by Schubert.
Everything in The Montana Stories has been published before in different collections but there is a special interest in reading someone's work chronologically (almost day by day during the especially creative months of July and August 1921); and the stories have never previously been published in tandem with extracts from Katherine Mansfield's letters and journals. Nor have the pictures in this volume been published before. There are ten of them, apart from the 1913 photograph of the chalet, all illustrating the stories from The Sphere that Katherine wrote in the late summer of 1921 in order to pay her doctor's bills. She disliked the drawings yet their idiom must have accompanied her imaginatively to some extent and is an important part of The Montana Stories; only by seeing them, and only by reading the fragments, diary entries and letters as well as the stories can we understand how a writer of genius forced herself on during this creative and productive time.
Four of the short stories in this collection were read on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service by Emilia Fox.

About this title

Synopsis:

Contains all the short stories written during the last year of Katherine Mansfield's life at Montana, with a new and lengthy publisher's note.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1903155150
• ISBN 13: 9781903155158
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336