Small gestures and sudden changes in perception are the real events in Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction. The Garden Party follows an affluent young woman whose household celebration is interrupted by news of a nearby working-class death, while Bliss turns a dinner party and an intense feeling of happiness into a discovery about marriage. Prelude and At the Bay draw on a New Zealand family closely related to Mansfield’s own background, moving between adults and children without one dominant viewpoint. Her prose is compressed, impressionistic and attentive to gesture, sound and thought rather than plot twists. The clearest marketplace links are modernist short stories, New Zealand literature and psychologically subtle domestic fiction alongside Chekhov and Virginia Woolf. Read more Less
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