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kaayycee's review against another edition
favourites:
- "tiredness of rosabell"
- "prelude"
- "at the bay"
- "revelations"
- "garden-party"
- "six years after"
- "the fly"
aekaste's review against another edition
5.0
Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite. A painful, beautiful pleasure to read. Mansfield is such an intuitive and loving author. I took about a year to finish it, but now I’m done with it I’m a little sad I didn’t take even longer.
janietheereader's review against another edition
4.0
Mansfield's writing is a delight; there is something so traditional working simultaneously alongside her more experimental/modernist prose style. I found a very high amount of enjoyment in reading this selection of short stories.
nightwater32's review against another edition
4.0
Beautiful collection of stories. While some are harder, at least for me, to get into, they're all well-crafted examinations of characters. There were definitely stories where I could see the modern-day equivalents of some of the people in her stories around me.
califlour's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
drandra's review against another edition
5.0
Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite. A painful, beautiful pleasure to read. Mansfield is such an intuitive and loving author. I took about a year to finish it, but now I’m done with it I’m a little sad I didn’t take even longer.
infinitezest's review against another edition
4.0
Katherine Mansfield's short stories were originally published in the 1930s, and I found most of them surprisingly relevant and insightful despite antiquated settings. It seems that people don't change that much after all. It's easy to read several Mansfield stories in a row, because each story is a "day in the life" of an everyday person. Sometimes nothing really happens; other times there is a plot. Either way, the story is more about the small details. People in these stories don't usually express their feelings outwardly; instead, we discover them through clues. Stories like "The Black Cap" and "The Garden Party" stayed in my mind long after I finished them because they strongly conveyed a sense of humanity without the need for characters to make grand speeches or even acknowledge their thoughts to themselves. In fact, that's perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this collection - characters are unbelievably self-centered but possess no self-awareness. While in some instances this probably reflects real life, in others it feels cynical and even ridiculous. At the same time, Mansfield ably conveys the complex thoughts and feelings of characters of all ages and stations in life. She depicts the cruelty of children like someone who still feels the sting of grade school taunts; she knows the nuances of old age before she's experienced it; and she nimbly hops between the worlds of the rich and the poor. The only group of people she is absolutely terrible at portraying is foreigners - for her, in particular, Germans. Her feelings toward those she considers lower than herself are most evident in these stories and I found myself wanting to skip over any story that included German characters for this reason. I also didn't read the small collection of unfinished stories at the end, because I don't think unfinished stories are intended for the general reading public. However, I'd still recommend this collection to anyone who wants to explore more short stories or female writers.
invertible_hulk's review against another edition
4.0
"The Man Without a Temperament" is one of the most beautiful short stories I have read in a long time. If not ever.