Katherine Mansfield (part 2)

Has Katherine Mansfield gone out of fashion? I couldn't find her in Waterstones or W H Smith. Not on the literary shelves. Not on the 20th century fiction shelves. Nothing in the library. Unless it was all out on loan, which I doubt. I finally found this collection in an academic bookshop. When I first discovered Mansfield back in the 80's she was always well-stocked in bookshops and there were quite a lot of articles about her in the media, too. After all, this was a young woman whose writing was not only admired and fostered but envied by Virgina Woolf.

I've now finished reading this collection and I would recommend The Daughters of the Late Colonel a bleakly comic tale about two delightful sisters, Josephine and Constantia, who have been so oppressed and bullied by their late father they still feel the need to defer to him even after his funeral has taken place. I also liked Marriage a la Mode in which a man's wife is heavily influenced by her pretentious literary and artistic friends who lounge around his house, eat all his food and sneer at him for working for a living. The Woman at the Store is a great, if disturbing, tale set in New Zealand which reminded me a little of the contemporary stories of Annie Proulx.