Bliss and Other Stories (Dodo Press) - Softcover

Mansfield, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1409901858 ISBN 13: 9781409901853

Publisher: Dodo Press, 2008

Synopsis

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (1888-1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction. She took on the pen-name Katherine Mansfield upon the publication of her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, in 1911. She also contracted gonorrhoea around this time, an event that was to plague her with arthritic pain for the rest of her short life, as well as to make her view herself as a 'soiled' woman. Her life and work were changed forever with the death of her brother, a soldier, during World War I. She was shocked and traumatised by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand. Miss Brill, the bittersweet story of a fragile woman living an ephemeral life of observation and simple pleasures in Paris, established Mansfield as one of the preeminent writers of the Modernist period, upon its publication in 1920's. She followed with the equally praised collection, The Garden Party, published in 1922.

About this title

Review:

This recording presents six of the thirteen stories originally published together in the 1920s... Each is served up by Juliet Stevenson as a rare delicacy, each character brought forth with perfect accent and timbre, each tale with full awareness of every nuance. The result? The listener is blessed with the good fortune of hearing two great storytellers working in concert, and it is absolute bliss --Maine Portland, AudioFile

Juliet Stevenson is the perfect narrator for these six delicately observed stories. In one, Bertha in her white dress and jade beads presides over a dinner party, her happiness to be obliterated by seeing her husband kiss heavy-lidded Pearl; in another, ex-lovers meet again beside a Japanese vase of paper daffodils. Unbeatable. --Rachel Redford, The Observer

About the Author:

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She came to London for the latter part of her education and settled in Europe. Her first writing was published in The New Age, to which she became a regular contributor. Her first book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married.

She was a conscious modernist, an experimenter in life and writing, and mixed with others of her kind, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. With 'Prelude' in 1916 she evolved her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction. By 1917 she had contracted tuberculosis, and from that time led a wandering life in search of health. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was published in 1921, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year later. After her death in 1923, two more collections of stories were published, also her Letters and later her Journal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dodo Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1409901858
• ISBN 13: 9781409901853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200