Six of the Best by Katherine Mansfield

By Katherine Mansfield

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Six of the Best
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781835474235

Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in New Zealand in 1888. Her father sent her and her sisters to school in London, where she was editor of the school newspaper. Back in New Zealand, she started to write short stories but she grew tired of her life there. She returned to Europe in 1908 and went on to live in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. A restless soul who had many love affairs, her modernist writing was admired by her peers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published her story ‘Prelude’ on their Hogarth Press. In 1917 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and she died in France aged only thirty-four.

Book preview

Six of the Best by Katherine Mansfield

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 

Katherine Mansfield - An Introduction

Katherine Mansfield was born on 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand, the third of five children.

A gifted Celloist, at one point she thought she might take it up professionally at the same time her early writing was published in school magazines.

At 19 Katherine left for home for England, there she met the modernist writers D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends.

She travelled around Europe before returning to New Zealand in 1906 and to begin writing a series of the short stories that she would later become famous for. They often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly.

In contrast her poetry is often overlooked and indeed it comes from seemingly a rather different part of her literary brain.  Her observations and language can at times seem innocent, almost child-like.  But there are others which give a very different view, another layer to be ventured into and discovered.

By 1908 she had returned to London and to a rather more bohemian lifestyle. A passionate affair resulted in her becoming pregnant but married off instead to an older man who she left the same evening with the marriage unconsummated. She was then to miscarry and be cut out of her mother’s will, allegedly because of her lesbianism.

In 1911 she started a relationship with John Middleton Murry a magazine editor and, although it was volatile, it enabled her to write some of her best stories.

During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible.

Katherine Mansfield died at the age of only 34 on January 9th 1923 in Fontainebleau, France.

Index of Contents

The Garden Party

Miss Brill

Bliss

A Dill Pickle

The Voyage

Life of Ma Parker

The Garden Party

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.

Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee.

Where do you want the marquee put, mother?

My dear child, it's no use asking me. I'm determined to leave everything to you children this year. Forget I am your mother. Treat me as an honoured guest.

But Meg could not possibly go and supervise the men. She had washed her hair before breakfast, and she sat drinking her coffee in a green turban, with a dark wet curl stamped on each cheek. Jose, the butterfly, always came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.

You'll have to go, Laura; you're the artistic one.

Away Laura flew, still holding her piece of bread-and-butter. It's so delicious to have an excuse for eating out of doors, and besides, she loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else.

Four men in their shirt-sleeves stood grouped together on the garden path. They carried staves covered with rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They looked impressive. Laura wished now that she had not got the bread-and-butter, but there was nowhere to put it, and she couldn't possibly throw it away. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them.

Good morning, she said, copying her mother's voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl, Oh—er—have you come—is it about the marquee?

That's right, miss, said the tallest of the men, a lanky, freckled fellow, and he shifted his tool-bag, knocked back his straw hat and smiled down at her. That's about it.

His smile was so easy, so friendly that Laura recovered. What nice eyes he had, small, but such a dark blue! And now she looked at the others, they were smiling too. Cheer up, we won't bite, their smile seemed to say. How very nice workmen were! And what a beautiful morning! She mustn't mention the morning; she must be business-like. The marquee.

Well, what about the lily-lawn? Would that do?

And she pointed to the lily-lawn with the hand that didn't hold the bread-and-butter. They turned, they stared in the direction. A little fat chap thrust out his under-lip, and the tall fellow frowned.

I don't fancy it, said he. Not conspicuous enough. You see, with a thing like a marquee, and he turned to Laura