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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield

The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922

By Katherine Mansfield, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan

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£34.99

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About this book

Brings together all of Mansfield's extant fiction

  • Refocuses critical attention on one of the most influential exponents of modernist fiction
  • The essential Mansfield text for individual scholars working on Mansfield studies, as well as those with a more general interest in Mansfield the writer
  • Redefines Mansfield as a writer for the next generation

The resurgence of interest in Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) in recent years has grown to the extent that she is now perceived as 'the most emblematic woman writer of her time'. Mansfield researchers have been frequently frustrated by the lack of a complete edition of her fiction. There are several editions of her stories in print, but these omit many pieces not already collected and published in the volumes edited by Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry after her death, from which present 'collected' editions derive.

This Edinburgh edition of her stories, published to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of her death in 1923, is a truly complete collection of the author's fiction writing. The editors have sought to include hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories. Placed in chronological order and fully annotated with clear, concise notes, this edition undertakes a complete remapping of the author's fiction output, from her earliest childhood pieces to the pitch-perfect quality of the mature writer at the height of her craft, thereby redefining Katherine Mansfield as a writer for the twenty-first century.

Reviews

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.
‘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.
Table of contents

Abbreviations and Textual Note; Fiction 1916–1922; 1916; That Woman; Last Words to Youth; The Laurels; 1917; The Lost Battle; Toots; Two Tuppenny Ones Please; Late at Night; The Black Cap; In Confidence; The Common Round; A Pic-Nic; Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day; Prelude; Feuille d’Album; A Dill Pickle; Love-Lies-Bleeding; 1918; Je ne parle pas français; Sun and Moon; Bliss; The Boy with the Jackdaw; To the Last Moment; Carnation; Love in Autumn; ‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown’; ‘A stupid, silly poem’; Keeping Up; ‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous’; 1919; A Suburban Fairy Tale; ‘It was neither dark nor light in the cabin’; See Saw; Pictures; ‘R’s first husband was a pawnbroker’; 1920; Late Spring; This Flower; Psychology; The Man Without a Temperament; The Wrong House; Revelations; The Escape; A Dance At The – – – ; Bank Holiday; The Wind Blows; The Young Girl; The Singing Lesson; The Stranger; Miss Brill; Poison; The Lady’s Maid; The Daughters of the Late Colonel; There is no Answer; You love me – still?; Tea on the Train; 1921; Life of Ma Parker; ‘After a succession of idle, careless, or clumsy, or unwilling little boys’; Mr and Mrs Dove; Susannah; Such a Sweet Old Lady; Sixpence; An Ideal Family; Hat with a Feather; Her First Ball; Marriage à la Mode; Widowed; At the Bay; The Voyage; A Married Man’s Story; Second Violin; All Serene!; By Moonlight; The Garden Party; The Doll’s House; Six Years After; Weak Heart; Daphne; ‘I suppose, doctor’; ‘Carriages are not allowed’; ‘It fell so softly, so gently’; ‘On her way back to the garden’; ‘What was there about the little house’; The Pessimist; The Sisters; ‘Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker’; Honesty; 1922; The Doves’ Nest; A Cup of Tea; Taking the Veil; Mr and Mrs Williams; The Fly; Confidences; The New Baby; ‘Have you seen my cosmias dear?’; A Man and His Dog; Honeymoon; It was the late afternoon; A Family Dance; ‘Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hotel’; Father and the Girls; My Darling; The Lily; Our Hilda; ‘One great advantage’; ‘There are certain human beings’; A Bad Idea; The Canary; Appendix B: Attributed Stories; Bibliography; Index of first lines; Index of stories.

About the contributors

Gerri Kimber

Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, and the author of Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life (2025), Katherine Mansfield – The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the 4-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16). Together with Claire Davison, she has edited the 4-volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete letters for EUP (2020–25).

Vincent O'Sullivan

Vincent O’Sullivan, Professor Emeritus, Victoria University of Wellington, is the world’s foremost Mansfield scholar and is President of the Katherine Mansfield Society. He has edited, with Margaret Scott, the five volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Letters, published by Oxford University Press. He is also widely published as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and biographer.

More in this series

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