Katherine Mansfield

One of the great Modernist authors, Katherine Mansfield was a short story virtuoso, redefining the genre with her subtle, powerfully perceptive tales. A prolific writer, she penned over 60 stories and several poetry collections before her death from TB in 1923, aged only 34.

This outstanding collection opens with Radio 4's 2020 series And Other Stories: Katherine Mansfield. It comprises dramatisations of 'Marriage a la Mode', 'Something Childish But Very Natural', 'Bliss', 'Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'The Garden Party', 'Ma Parker' and 'Her First Ball', all starring Hattie Morahan, as well as readings of 'The Stranger', 'Miss Brill', 'A Cup of Tea', Poison' and 'The Doll's House', narrated by Hugh Bonneville, Barbara Flynn, Hattie Morahan and Blake Ritson.

Eighty years ago, at the end of May 1921, Katherine Mansfield came to Switzerland, to live at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana (now Crans-Montana) in Switzerland. She was 32 and seriously ill with tuberculosis. The next few months were to be the most fruitful period of her life; she did not have much time left to her. The Montana Stories is a new edition compiled and edited by Persephone Books of everything Katherine Mansfield wrote between July 1921 and the end of January 1922 when she went to Paris for medical treatment. For completeness there are also the two stories and an unfinished fragment that she wrote after she left Montana and before her death in January 1923. She had of course written many short stories before, and had published two volumes of these, but as a collection The Montana Stories has a unique quality which inevitably owes something to her ill-health.

A collection containing thirty three stories and arranged in chronological order, from Katherine Mansfield's wide repertoire.

Katherine Mansfield is known for her tender humanity, her clarity, her wit and her courageous gaiety. Of this collection of stories, many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience.