She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bear

Katherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments – a chance meeting, a letter received, a careless remark – into small miracles of language and feeling.

Katherine Mansfield was the only writer Virginia Woolf envied. Mansfield transformed the short story genre with her work, creating stories miraculous in their intensity yet seemingly so simple. The shift of a heart, the beat of a moment, the changing of the light: in these stories emotional universes are contained within glimpses.

Mansfield only lived to the age of 34 but in that time wrote stories true to her indomitable spirit. A hundred years on from her death, Mansfield’s biographer, Claire Harman, has created this new selection to show us the master of the short story form in full flight.

WITH A FOREWORD BY HELEN SIMPSON AND INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE HARMAN

‘There is something rapturous about her work…she has the power to distil the apparently inconsequential into frozen moments laden with significance’ Guardian

‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people’ Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was one of the true pioneers of the short story. Her style shifts subtly between the comic and the tragic, as calm surfaces are punctured by moments of disruption, insight and strange beauty.

This new collection gathers together the best of Mansfield’s work exploring different facets of relationships between women. From complex expressions of desire and connection to shared experiences of frustration and release, these stories capture fleeting movements of feeling with unmatched precision.

Published in 1922, at the height of literary modernism, ‘The Garden Party’ is now considered one of the key texts of that movement. This volume, which also includes a wide selection of Katherine Mansfield’s other short stories, is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover one of the early twentieth century’s finest writers.

A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour’s demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.

The Penguin English Library – collectable general readers’ editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

Katherine Mansfield’s clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from short sharp studies to longer, richer tales, encompassing her three major volumes Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, and fifteen tantalizing fragments of unfinished stories published after her tragic death, including ‘Honesty’, an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and ‘The Doves’ Nest’, an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter in the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Graceful, delicate and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters’ inner lives.