The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 - (The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield) Annotated (Hardcover)

About the Book

This two-volume edition is a truly complete collection of the Katherine Mansfield's fiction writing, including hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories.

Book Synopsis

This two-volume edition is a truly complete collection of the Katherine Mansfield's fiction writing, including hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories.

From the Back Cover

'"We owe to her the prosperity of the 'free' story," Elizabeth Bowen said of Katherine Mansfield: "she untrammelled it from conventions." Here, at last, is the evidence in full: the edition Mansfield deserves.' Professor David Trotter, University of Cambridge 'This much needed and very welcome work does two important things: It gives us all of Mansfield's fiction, with useful notes; and it removes many of John Middleton Murry's intrusions into the stories he edited after Mansfield's death. We all owe the editors, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, a debt of gratitude for this excellent edition of the work of a major modernist writer.' Professor Robert Scholes, Brown University The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 1 Fiction 1898-1915 Edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan The first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield's fiction These two volumes collect together 219 of Mansfield's stories, including 4 newly discovered, previously unpublished stories. Together the volumes expand considerably upon the largest previous single collected edition of 85 stories. Gathered here are Mansfield's best-loved stories, stories uncollected, unpublished or left incomplete during her lifetime, the full text of The Aloe, from which Mansfield shaped her ground-breaking work Prelude, and her own manuscript versions of several stories later 'edited' by her husband, John Middleton Murry. The volumes are arranged in chronological order, so that readers can trace Mansfield's progress as a creative writer, month-by-month, from her first schoolgirl story in 1898 to her last completed story in July 1922. Mansfield will be read differently, and more accurately, as a result of this edition. The annotations and their cross-referencing to her letters and notebooks deepen what we know of the context and genesis of her fiction. This edition is testament to Mansfield's importance among twentieth century English-language writers and to her rare and original handling of the short story form. Gerri Kimber is a Senior Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Northampton. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is co-editor of three essay collections: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011), and Framed: Essays in French Studies. Vincent O'Sullivan, Professor Emeritus, Victoria University of Wellington, has published widely on Mansfield and is President of the Katherine Mansfield Society. He has edited, with Margaret Scott, the five volume edition of Katherine Mansfield's Collected Letters, published by Oxford University Press. He is also widely published as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and biographer. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield in 4 volumes

Review Quotes

Kimber and O'Sullivan have produced a work of superb scholarship that is clearly also a labour of love. Their Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, containing every fragment as well as all the finished stories (some rescued from the meddlesome editorial hands of her second husband, John Middleton Murry, and restored to their original state), undeniably establishes her as a great modernist writer.--Elizabeth Wassell "The Irish Times"

Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan have been instrumental in developing the ambitious Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The first two volumes of Mansfield's Collected Fiction appeared in 2012, covering 1898-1915 and 1916-22 respectively. These are punctiliously edited texts with introductory materials that allow scholars to interpret Mansfield's dissident difference as an author via ideologies of rootedness versus roaming, her New Zealand upbringing (canvassed recently by Doreen D'Cruz and John C. Ross in The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction), her colonial anxieties, feminist aesthetics, and tangled, uneasy sexual politics.--Andrew Radford "The Year's Work in English Studies"

The Edinburgh University Press volumes will finally make available, almost a century after her death, a complete, scholarly edition of the collected works of Katherine Mansfield. This, in other words, is an important publishing moment not only for New Zealand literature but for early twentieth-century literary scholarship more generally. And central to this venture are the two volumes of fiction, which themselves constitute a significant step towards the complete and definitive publication of the work of the period's most original, prolific, and indeed influential short story writer.--Andrew Bennett "The Journal of New Zealand Literature"

This much needed and very welcome work does two important things: It gives us all of Mansfield's fiction, with useful notes; and it removes many of John Middleton Murry's intrusions into the stories he edited after Mansfield's death. We all owe the editors, Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, a debt of gratitude for this excellent edition of the work of a major modernist writer.--Professor Robert Scholes, Brown University

We owe to her the prosperity of the 'free' story, ' Elizabeth Bowen said of Katherine Mansfield: 'she untrammelled it from conventions.' Here, at last, is the evidence in full: the edition Mansfield deserves.--Professor David Trotter, University of Cambridge

'The editors of the collected fiction are unstinting in their attention to detail, dating and biography. Their efforts give us a picture of an artist discovering what it is she wants to do to be different from the rest, to find a story and a way of telling it that will be hers and hers alone.'--Kirsty Gunn "London Review of Books"

Kimber and O'Sullivan have created a wonderful and accessible short story collection, which is sure to delight a wealth of readers.-- "Kirsty Hewitt, Good Reads"

About the Author

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

Vincent O'Sullivan, Professor Emeritus, Victoria University of Wellington, is the world's foremost Mansfield scholar and is President of the Katherine Mansfield Society. He has edited, with Margaret Scott, the five volume edition of Katherine Mansfield's Collected Letters, published by Oxford University Press. He is also widely published as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and biographer.