Many of the stories included here were first published in such magazines as the New Age, Rhythm, or the Athenaeum. Information about the stories’ first appearance, for which I am indebted to B. J. Kirkpatrick’s comprehensive A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield, is given in the Explanatory Notes at the end of the book. Most of Mansfield’s stories were included in volumes published either by her in her lifetime or immediately after her death by her husband, John Middleton Murry. In 1984 Antony Alpers, author of the most comprehensive biography of Mansfield, published The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. He omitted some of the stories included in the Constable volume edited by John Middleton Murry in 1945, and included some early work which had not previously appeared in book form. He also returned to the manuscripts of the stories if they still existed; to the first editions of the three books that appeared in Mansfield’s lifetime, which she had checked or amended in proof; and to magazine versions of the stories for which she usually had no access to the proofs. The text of the stories here is taken from that edition (punctuation slightly amended occasionally), with the exception of ‘A Cup of Tea’, not included by Alpers, and taken from the Constable edition. The extensive ‘Commentary’ at the end of Alpers’s edition of the stories is invaluable; I have used it in the notes on individual stories. The most significant difference between the Constable edition and this one occurs in ‘Je ne parle pas français’; Michael Sadleir insisted that Mansfield should bowdlerize the story if Constable was to publish it. She did so, though the original version appeared as the second publication of the Murrys’ own Heron Press and is reinstated here as it is in Alpers’s edition of the stories.
The notes to individual stories include Mansfield’s comments on them, where they are relevant; the stories are in the chronological order offered by Alpers. Some of her early stories, written for Rhythm or the Blue Review, which were not part of Dan Davin’s previous World’s Classics selection, are included here: ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘Millie’, and ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’. Mansfield herself refused to allow ‘The Woman at the Store’, for p. xxxiv↵example, to be reprinted during her lifetime. Its conventional form, with the narrative twist at the end, was a structure she subsequently rejected, but it evokes the ironic in-between situation of the protagonist whose womanhood has been her destruction and whose store is empty. These are early examples of Mansfield’s brilliant probing of what she called, as a girl, women’s ‘self fashioned chains of slavery’: that is, girls’ and women’s complicity with patriarchy. The only story set in Europe that is added, ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, originally appeared in the New Age and is the most complex of the satirical stories about Bavaria in In a German Pension. It anticipates the nuanced narrative perspective that Mansfield was later to develop with such subtlety, suggesting the young Frau’s secret self through the way in which she perceives the bride’s and her own situation: ‘she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her’ (p. 5). ‘The Wind Blows’ is included partly because it was admired by Mansfield’s contemporaries, including Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, but also for its surreal and almost cinematic conclusion. It is not included in the selections of Mansfield’s stories edited by Elizabeth Bowen and by Claire Tomalin, but Tomalin includes ‘A Married Man’s Story’, which is also added here. It is comparable with ‘Je ne parle pas français’ in that the male narrators of both stories are writers telling their own macabre stories. The sinister married man tells ‘the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it’ (p. 328); the story is unfinished but that intensifies its malign suggestiveness.
I have indicated in the notes for ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ that an account of an incident which is directly comparable with the story is given in Mansfield’s notebooks. Otherwise I have generally avoided biographical speculation, in spite of the possible correlations that can be made between the life and the stories. As Mansfield wrote in a notebook that was mainly concerned with her reading of Shakespeare: ‘That which suggests the subject to the artist is the unlikeness of it to what we accept as reality. We single out, we bring into the light, we put up higher’ (KM Notebooks, ii. 267).