Katherine Mansfield

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

A cellist and a gifted singer, Katherine Mansfield, born in 1888, was always writing as well. She found New Zealand, her birthplace, stultifying, so she wrote in her journals of feeling alienated, and of how she had become disillusioned because of the repression of the Maori people. (Maori characters are often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories.) With £100 a year from her father, she was able to escape New Zealand when she was nineteen, never to return—though she kept that world alive in some of her best stories.

From The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield:

“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.”

Mansfield was a true bohemian. Her lovers included both men and women and, in 1909, pregnant by one man, she married another, left him after a day, miscarried, and began a lesbian relationship with her girlhood friend Ida Baker, who would play an important role throughout Mansfield’s life. She called Baker her “wife.”

Mansfield finally married the writer/editor John Middleton Murry in 1918; briefly and disastrously, they shared a semi-communal arrangement with D. H. Lawrence and his wife.

In 1923, Mansfield died at thirty-five after a fatal hemorrhage. Murry immediately published her posthumous works, editing her journals, and presenting an idealized version of her as a tragic and beautiful spirit. Virginia Woolf said that Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of.

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“Prelude.” A key figure in the Modernist movement, Katherine Mansfield perfected the art of the short story. One of her most important works, “Prelude,” established her reputation as a master of short fiction.

Iced passion fruit

In one of her short stories, “The Garden Party,” Laura, pressured by her family to overcome her distress, offers arriving guests passion-fruit ices.

4 oz. mango passion fruit sorbet vodka

1 oz. passion fruit liqueur

Crushed ice

1 slice watermelon

Fill a shaker with ice cubes. Add all ingredients except watermelon slice. Shake and strain into a tall glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with watermelon. Serves 1.