Prelude & Other Stories

Radical, witty and inventive, Katherine Mansfield is one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished short-story writers and this selection of stories showcases her dazzling skill.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Prelude & Other Stories is edited and introduced by Professor Meg Jensen.

This selection of stories by Katherine Mansfield showcases her remarkable ability to delve into the human mind; in stories such as ‘The Garden Party’ she reveals the tension between innocence and corruption, the dark side of love and romance are explored in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Love à la Mode’, and in the title story, ‘Prelude’, inspired by her own childhood, her concern is for the isolated and the lonely. Collected together for the first time, this selection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield showcase her remarkable ability to delve deep into human psychology.

Review

Her writing was as impenetrable as she was: romantic, excitable, sharp-edged, malicious and cold, charming and funny, lonely, proud, vulnerable, a wearer of masks ― Guardian

Mansfield’s work displays a quick, sardonic wit that sharply interrogates romantic concepts of genius and ironizes naïve expectation ― The Paris Review

About the Author

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in New Zealand in 1888. Her father sent her and her sisters to school in London, where she was editor of the school newspaper. Back in New Zealand, she started to write short stories but she grew tired of her life there. She returned to Europe in 1908 and went on to live in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. A restless soul who had many love affairs, her modernist writing was admired by her peers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published her story ‘Prelude’ on their Hogarth Press. In 1917 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and she died in France aged only thirty-four.

Dr Meg Jensen is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London where her research centres on representations of trauma in various forms of autobiographically based art from novels to poetry to painting. She has published on the work of writers including Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac and Louisa May Alcott. Her most recent publication is The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths.