Bliss and Other Stories
Mansfield's stories rarely have plots in the conventional sense. A woman gives a dinner party and realises something about her marriage in the middle of it; a family moves house; a young woman notices the pear tree outside the window and everything shifts.
She learned from Chekhov that a story can turn on a single detail, and she pushed that further than most English writers. The prose is exact and the endings are often abrupt. Read them slowly, because the effect depends on accumulation rather than event.
Public-domain status
First published in 1920. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Katherine Mansfield died in 1923, so this work has been free to republish there since 1994.
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Keep reading
- Dubliners — James Joyce, 1914
- The Garden Party and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1922
- The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 — Edgar Allan Poe, 1840
- Twice-Told Tales — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837
- Wellington — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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