“A Little Savage From New Zealand”

A Telegraph review of Penguin’s Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield celebrates the influential author’s short yet remarkable life. Born in Wellington in 1888, Mansfield made a strong and lasting impression on the London literary scene before her death from tuberculosis aged 32. In her lifetime she was a friend and muse to D.H Lawrence and rival to Virginia Woolf; since her death her work has inspired authors as diverse as Philip Larkin, Angela Carter and Willa Cather. Telegraph: “According to the different claims of her various biographers and critics … she’s been a sweet and wholesome tragic victim, a selfish dark-eyed piece of trouble, a feminist, an  anti-feminist, a satirist, a sentimentalist, a miniaturist, an overinflated reputation, a repressed lesbian, a colonial bisexual angel-devil plagiarist original.” Mansfield is widely viewed as a master of the short story form. The greatest examples of her work – all featured in the new Penguin collection – include At the Bay, The Garden-Party, The Doll’s House and A Married Man’s Story.