Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield

Mansfield’s journals were published soon after her death by her widower, John Middleton Murry, and made an enormous impression on the reading public (though he was also widely criticised for exposing too much of her private life). Mansfield loved performing and was a great mimic and raconteur, but she is never just funny this story ends on a mystical note, with an overwhelming sense of the pathos of the sisters’ situation. Their hesitancy about everything – even simple tasks such as ordering food and sorting out their father’s things – are a source of droll humour throughout, but the scene where their nephew Cyril has to make small talk about meringues is one of the funniest ever, masterfully set up and executed. The title characters are two middle-aged spinsters whose overbearing father has just died, leaving them to take responsibility for themselves for the first time. The Daughters of the Late Colonel always seems to me a perfect example of short fiction: clever, subtle, poignant and as satisfying as a whole novel.

And the ending is wonderfully ambivalent, as it is so often in Mansfield’s work. There’s gaiety in it as well as genuine darkness, with the Edwardian middle-class world of the Sheridan family evoked in loving detail but undercut by events happening just off-stage. The title story is one of her best known, told from the point of view of young Laura Sheridan, who is trying to do the right thing when a tragic accident threatens to disrupt a family party. Her range and skill here is thrilling, from the lyricism of At the Bay and The Voyage to the waspish satire of Marriage à la Mode, the pathos of Life of Ma Parker or the surrealism of Miss Brill. The collection to start with is The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922 when she was at the peak of her powers. She was also, exclusively, a short story writer, so if you dislike one of her inventions, it is easy to move on to another. While Mansfield was a pioneering modernist, her writing was very accessible and she was critical of books that weren’t (she felt “stupefied” by Joyce’s Ulysses ).

Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield