A collection of short stories: Something Childish But Very Natural, Feuille d'Album, Mr And Mrs Dove, Marriage á la Mode, Bliss, Honeymoon, A Dill Pickle, Widow.

The stories were nice but overall I just felt something was lacking.

This is a charming collection of short stories showcasing the innocence of love instead of focusing on the more intense feelings that it creates. There is an emphasis on first loves and love that feels more innocent.

All of the stories are very charming and almost cutesy in a way. Despite the fact that they were written about 100 years ago, they do feel quite modern in a way, probably due to that subject matter being something that everyone will experience at some point in their lifetimes.

If love was a red dress

Short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a perfect stranger to me until I got intrigued by a few sentences about her in Alexandra Harris’s short biography on [b:Virginia Woolf|11789895|Virginia Woolf|Alexandra Harris|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348425769l/11789895._SY75_.jpg|16742183], depicting her as a friend with whom Woolf had a thoroughly complicated and almost obsessive literary and personal relationship, mutually inspiring but also rivalrous. Woolf wrote in her diary about Mansfield: ‘I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’

Detecting this charming booklet in my favorite second-hand bookshop was obviously a golden opportunity to get acquainted with some of her stories. Something childish but very natural was published in 2007 as part of a Penguin Books series ‘Great Loves’, a series promising to ‘bring the most seductive, inspiring and surprising writing on love in all its infinite variety’. As love is definitely a theme one could never know enough about and admiring the awesome book cover design (by David Pearson, Victoria Sawdon and Claire Scully ) of most of the volumes in this series, I would collect them all, if it wasn’t that some of the delectable volumes happen to be just excerpts from major works (Virgil, Stendhal, Casanova) or translations from French originals.

This little collection, named after the ironic title of the first story, brings together eight short stories: Something Childish But Very Natural(1914); Feuille d’Album(1917); Mr and Mrs Dove(1921); Marriage à la Mode(1921); Bliss(1918); Honeymoon(1922); Dill Pickle(1917); and Widowed (1921).

As the stories which mention a location are all set in Europe (London, Paris, the South of France…), it was only by reading on Mansfield’s life it occurred to me she actually was a New Zealand writer – which made me aware Mansfield is only the second writer from New Zealand I have yet read (Keri Hulme (from the [b:The Bone People|460635|The Bone People|Keri Hulme|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348988500l/460635._SY75_.jpg|1294681]) being the first, not that their work is by any means affiliated) and hang my head in shame for my petty Eurocentrism. Mansfield’s ambition was no less than putting New Zealand on the literary map, like her paragon Anton Chekhov did for Mother Russia.

Each of the eight stories conveys a subsequent stage love can pass through: from a coup de foudre, a tender infatuation, a proposal of marriage, a honeymoon, two scenes of conjugal life, an encounter with an old flame and widowhood.

In subtle hues Mansfield sensuously paints the complexity of emotions, mostly bittersweet moments of thorny innocence, fragile happiness sprouting from blissful immature ignorance or childish ingenuousness, vulnerability doomed to crumble under the reality of unrequitedness, marital cruelty, disillusionment or social conventions. Most the stories have an ambiguous or an open ending, leaving the reader wondering what will happen to the protagonist(s) now the curtain has fallen. The beauty of nature is largely present - spring, rain, flowers, a pear tree participate in the stories, enrapturing and whetting the senses:

At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn’t help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk.

Mansfield’s stories are called ‘impressionistic’, modernist and inspired by Anton Chekhov, who she almost deified and strongly identified herself with – suffering both from the same illness and equally afflicted with a sense of frustrated urgency to write their innovative prose before their lives would be cut short. Her style and the nature of her stories, highlighting unexpected details and shifts in ordinary lives, reminded me of Alice Munro’s. Whatever categories apply to her writing however, to me this are quintessential short stories: within a few pages the reader gets a glimpse of a miniaturized universe, visually and psychologically suggestive, focalizing on the interior life of the protagonist, things unsaid leaving plenty of room for (multiple) interpretation.

All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss

Although, probably for reasons of recognizability, I was deeply touched by the last story of the collection, Widowed, a story on a woman ruminating on the moment she learned about her spouse’s sudden death, while breakfasting for the first time with her new suitor (the reminiscence of lost scent and touch powerfully captured in a few words about clothing: ’How pleasant it was to feel that rough man’s tweed again. She rubbed her hand against it, touched it with her cheek, sniffed the smell.’), my favorite story was Bliss - a sexually ambivalent story about a somewhat neurotic young upper class housewife hosting an arty-farty dinner party, rich with symbols (

Spoiler

the blossoming pear tree a phallic or bisexual symbol, honestly? Freudian interpretations can be such fun.

with a stunning epiphanic denouement. Bliss was utterly disliked by Virginia Woolf, who dismissed it as ‘so hard, & so shallow & so sentimental’. Mansfield in return chillingly critiqued Woolf’s second novel [b:Night and Day|116056|Night and Day|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368337020l/116056._SY75_.jpg|1019503] as containing ‘a lie in the soul’ because of disregarding the war.

“The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”



The portrait is by the American painter Anne Estelle Rice. In 1918 she painted her close friend dressed in the color both women loved, red, on a stay in Cornwall, where Katherine, suffering from tuberculosis, hoped to regain her health. She died in France in January 1923, 34 years old.

Marvelous. I loved the ambiance of these stories.

Lovely little short stories on love. Bittersweet sometimes sad. My favorite: Bliss and Marriage a la Mode.

lovely and cute.

Quick and mostly sad short stories about romantic relationships. I particularly enjoyed how Mansfield presents her characters' actions without interpreting them or judging them for you.