New Zealand Stories

Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand's most celebrated writer, and one of the key figures in the history of the short story in English. Yet in this book the stories set in her own country have been collected and published in the order in which she wrote them for the first time. The Mansfield who emerges from this fresh perspective is both familiar and unexpected. This collection confirms the detailed reality of her New Zealand, both its backblocks and its marginality, as well as the subtle family exchanges of the famous Wellington narratives. Reading these stories in sequence and as a group brings into focus the sharp political dimension of Mansfield's fiction as well as the emphases that fall so differently from those in her English and European stories. In this volume Mansfield is seen with new clarity as a colonial writer at the same time as she extends the boundaries of what modern short fiction could achieve. This book contains the following stories: * About Pat (1905) * In the Botanical Gardens (1907) * Leves Amores (1907) * A Birthday (1911) * Love-Lies-Bleeding (1911/1917) * The Woman at the Store (1912) * How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912) * The Little Girl (1912) * Ole Underwood (1912) * Millie (1913) * Old Tar (1913) * The Wind Blows (1915) * Kezia and Tui (1916) * A Pic-nic (1917) * Prelude (1917) * The Stranger (1920) * An Ideal Family (1921) * Her First Ball (1921) * At the Bay (1921) * The Voyage (1921) * A Bad Idea (1921) * A Married Man's Story (1921) * The Garden Party (1921) * The Doll's House (1921) * Six Years After (1921) * Weak Heart (1921) * Daphne (1921) * Taking the Veil (1922) * The Canary (1922)