Кэтрин Мэнсфилд – Selected Stories (страница 1)
SELECTED STORIES
Katherine Mansfield
William Collins
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Source ISBN: 9780008133269
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008133276
Version: 2015-07-21
CONTENTS
How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
FROM
FROM
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
FROM
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824,
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel,
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
When Katherine Mansfield died at the age of just thirty-four, she was buried beneath a stone that records the span of her life – 1888 to 1923 – and sums her up as ‘Katherine Mansfield, wife of John Middleton Murry’. Her husband, who himself lasted another thirty-four years, memorialised her by publishing collections of her short stories, letters and previously private journals; it was not long before her death was considered a loss not just for literature but also for humanity. Katherine Mansfield was a beautiful soul who had been taken too young.
There is a certain amount of truth in the above, but the ‘wife of John Middleton Murry’ whose legacy was initially defined by her highly edited posthumous outpouring was not quite the same person as the Katherine Mansfield who had lived, loved and written so briefly and intensely. She was in fact an extraordinarily conflicted and complicated woman, a restless soul, critical of others as much as herself, a free spirit born in the wrong era – and the ‘wife’ of a good many more people than John Middleton Murry.
Restless Wonder
Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield was the middle daughter of five born to Annie and Sir Harold Beauchamp, a successful banker; the couple eventually had a much-longed-for son. The Beauchamp parents were descended from British immigrants and retained an affinity with England that was transferred to Katherine. When the family moved to London in 1903, Katherine’s creative side was brought to life. Although she was already a talented cellist and an amateur writer showing ‘promise of great merit’, albeit ‘surly’ and ‘imaginative to the point of untruth’, in England she discovered a rich literary heritage that she yearned to become a part of. She composed a number of stories for her school’s newspaper, of which she later became the editor.
By the time the Beauchamps returned to New Zealand in 1906, Katherine was convinced that ‘the days full of perpetual Society functions’ that her father’s position demanded were unequivocally not for her. It was a ‘waste of life’ – something she would continue to find deplorable to her dying day. She considered her parents ‘quite unbearable’, as well as ‘so absolutely my mental inferiors’. ‘What is going to happen in the future?’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I am full of restless wonder.’ Mansfield longed to be elsewhere doing more exciting things – and in 1908, having secured an annual allowance of £100 from her father, she sailed for London and did just that.
Living Dangerously
Katherine Mansfield arrived in London as a nineteen-year-old on the lookout for life. Even by modern standards, she threw herself into this pursuit as if she were out for revenge. She later looked back on this period as one in which she became ‘an ardent disciple of the doctrine of living dangerously’. Within eight months she had resumed a friendship with Arnold Trowell, a fellow cellist from Wellington with whom she had previously thought herself in love; become pregnant by his twin brother, Garnet; hastily married George Bowden, an older music teacher whom she barely knew; and abandoned him on the night of their wedding.
Of greatest concern to her mother back in New Zealand, however, was Mansfield’s intense friendship with Ida Baker, a South African girl she had met during the family’s three-year stint in London. Deducing – not without cause – that Katherine’s apparent breakdown was the result of a romantic relationship with Baker, Mrs Beauchamp packed her daughter off to a Bavarian spa resort, returned to Wellington and promptly deleted her from her will. Katherine suffered a miscarriage during her expulsion to Germany.
But, as so often in her short life, Mansfield would not be beaten down or told what to do. Returning to London in 1910, she struck up a series of relationships with both men and women, including Ida Baker, and embarked on a period of prolific short-story writing. She even found inspiration in her hellish Bavarian exile, writing satirical sketches of German life that became her first published collection,