East of the Sun & West of the Moon

The Garden-Party and other stories by Katherine Mansfield

I started reading Katherine Mansfield a few years ago because of Virginia Woolf. She once famously wrote: “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” (This quotation appears in the mini-biography of Mansfield at the beginning of my Penguin edition of her Collected Stories.) I’m not sure where I first read this, but this was such an intriguing comment that I absolutely had to find out what Woolf was jealous of!

I think that whoever wrote the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition had it right when they called Mansfield’s stories “graceful, delicate, and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters’ inner lives.” I absolutely agree with this. Each story seems to recount some small, insignificant moment of everyday life that turns out to be a moment of clarity to the main character of the story, who then comes to a painful conclusion about society or their own life. I found this really surprising at first, because the stories really don’t start out with a sad feel to them at all. But there comes a turning point in almost each tale where you realize that things are not going to work out quite how you expected or hoped, and this is usually not for the better. In addition, I felt that these endings came somewhat abruptly, and left me wanting the story to continue because I wasn’t ready to part ways with the characters she introduced. In fact, when I was most of the way through this collection I was taken aback by a tale that had an indisputably happy ending, with no bittersweetness to it at all.

Even though these tales are quite sad, I still love them. Each story offers an intimate and detailed glimpse into a person’s life, almost as though you were given a window into someone’s mind that only lasted a few hours, or a day at most. I came to love them for their feeling of incompleteness, as though these stories were interesting people I had encountered on a train in another country, and would never meet again.

I agree with Woolf – this is writing to be jealous of! (But unlike Woolf, I must admit to a similar jealousy when it comes to many other writers!).

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling – how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again …