Roman Clodia's Reviews > The Collected Stories

Why is it so difficult to write simply - and not simply only but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No fine effects - no bravura. But just the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it.
(A Married Man's Story)

This striking extract from Mansfield's unfinished story 'A Married Man's Story' almost reads like a cutting from her journal: that concept of writing sotto voce is one of the best ways of describing a crucial quality of Mansfield's art - not just capturing interiority but also that sense of things that the character wants to say and yet daren't quite say out loud. It's interesting that she puts these words into the mouth of a male character - but, then, androgyny was something that Mansfield embraced - and also foregrounds that tension between 'plain truth' and 'as only a liar can tell it'.

Because for all the 'truth' of Mansfield's stories, there's simultaneously something artfully constructed about them. Characters are performative and fluid, and theatrical similes and metaphors abound. From the teacher in 'A Singing Lesson' who acts the strict schoolmistress while processing the heartbreaking news of a letter she's just received, to the eponymous Miss Brill who finds her role rejected by her audience who place her in quite a different way, to the inner lives of so many married couples which radically contest their surface ways of beings, Mansfield excavates a sense of what's hidden, subterranean, never fully acknowledged... until it pours out as a kind of muted epiphany.

This collection comprises the volumes Bliss and Other Stories, The Garden Party and Other Stories, In a German Pension together with early stories and unfinished tales. It's fascinating to see how the early stories already gesture towards key Mansfield themes but feel less polished, less dense, the writing and conceptualisation less layered. For one of the things that is so distinctively Mansfield is the way she is so accessible, so seemingly straightforward ('no fine effects - no bravura') while adding symbolic resonance via tone, rhythm and imagery.

At heart, these stories rest on an un-reconcilable conflict between a frantic, gorgeous embracing of life and a melancholic sense of the betrayals of love, of confidence and the presence of death. It's hard not to attribute this to Mansfield's ill health and fore-shortened life, her untimely death at the age of just 34 when she had so much she wanted to do and write. There's a sense of rootlessness, restlessness, so many stories involving travel, something attributed, probably rightly, to Mansfield's own sense of being a 'colonial', hence an outsider to some extent and an observer, but which also seems to be something intrinsic to her personality.

These glorious, artful stories are all the evidence we need to understand why Mansfield was a writer of whom Virginia Woolf was jealous: as Woolf wrote in her diary, there's 'no point in writing any more... Katherine won't read it... Katherine's my rival no longer'.