'"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 18981915
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These two volumes collect together 219 of Mansfield's stories, including 4 newly discovered, previously unpublished stories.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 Gathered here are Mansfield's best-loved stories, stories uncollected, unpublished or left incomplete during her lifetime, the full text of The Aloe, from which Mansfield shaped her ground-breaking work Prelude, and her own manuscript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.
The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield in 4 volumes