The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915

This much needed and very welcome work does two important things: It gives us all of Mansfield’s fiction, with useful notes; and it removes many of John Middleton Murry’s intrusions into the stories he edited after Mansfield’s death. We all owe the editors, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, a debt of gratitude for this excellent edition of the work of a major modernist writer.

We owe to her the prosperity of the 'free' story,' Elizabeth Bowen said of Katherine Mansfield: 'she untrammelled it from conventions.' Here, at last, is the evidence in full: the edition Mansfield deserves.

Kimber and O’Sullivan have created a wonderful and accessible short story collection, which is sure to delight a wealth of readers.

‘The editors of the collected fiction are unstinting in their attention to detail, dating and biography. Their efforts give us a picture of an artist discovering what it is she wants to do to be different from the rest, to find a story and a way of telling it that will be hers and hers alone.’

Kimber and O’Sullivan have produced a work of superb scholarship that is clearly also a labour of love. Their Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, containing every fragment as well as all the finished stories (some rescued from the meddlesome editorial hands of her second husband, John Middleton Murry, and restored to their original state), undeniably establishes her as a great modernist writer.

The Edinburgh University Press volumes will finally make available, almost a century after her death, a complete, scholarly edition of the collected works of Katherine Mansfield. This, in other words, is an important publishing moment not only for New Zealand literature but for early twentieth-century literary scholarship more generally. And central to this venture are the two volumes of fiction, which themselves constitute a significant step towards the complete and definitive publication of the work of the period’s most original, prolific, and indeed influential short story writer.

Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan have been instrumental in developing the ambitious Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The first two volumes of Mansfield’s Collected Fiction appeared in 2012, covering 1898–1915 and 1916–22 respectively. These are punctiliously edited texts with introductory materials that allow scholars to interpret Mansfield’s dissident difference as an author via ideologies of rootedness versus roaming, her New Zealand upbringing (canvassed recently by Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross in The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction), her colonial anxieties, feminist aesthetics, and tangled, uneasy sexual politics.