A Few Words on Katherine Mansfield

This weekend you have (hopefully) been reading Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay." The story is based on her childhood in New Zealand, and gives an impressionistic view of a family. We'll be using this story to examine the importance of setting. But who was its author?

Katherine Mansfield went to London to be where the action was, and fell in with a group of writers known as the Bloomsbury Group. During her short life she produced four collections of short stories. "At the Bay" is taken from The Garden Party and Other Stories. She died in 1923 after years of suffering from tubercolosis.

The English newspaper The Guardian has an excellent blog entry on the author. Chris Power writes:

Taken as a whole Mansfield's work confounds because, from 1915 onwards (following her debut she suffered several years of writer's block), the very good and the plain bad arrive tripping over one another's heels. All writers fail as well as triumph, but the gulf between the successful and the disastrous is rarely as wide as it is in her work.

A useful reminder, that not all of them can be masterpieces. But don't worry, "At the Bay" is.