Bliss, and Other Stories, Classics To Go
Bliss and Other Stories is a 1920 collection of short stories by the writer Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield's writing is lovely, even thrilling in places (that scene in 'Bliss' when Bertha sees her husband in the hall...) and while the alignments to Woolf are clear, the style is also reminiscent at times of Colette and look forward to Jean Rhys. Observant, perceptive, capturing moments of subjectivity and interiority in motion, attentive to gender and gendered (mis)understandings, sometimes wickedly witty ("It begins with an incredibly beautiful line: 'Why Must It Always Be Tomato Soup?'") these are little moments of life being lived, not always happily, but captured indelibly. (Goodreads)
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer, essayist and journalist, widely considered one of the most influential and important authors of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages. Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34.
