Where to start with: Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield – the only writer, Virginia Woolf said, that she had ever been jealous of – was known for her modernist short stories that explored anxiety and sexuality. This month sees the 100th anniversary of her death so now is as good a time as any to get stuck in if you’ve never given the New Zealand writer a try before. Biographer Claire Harman suggests some good ways in.

The entry point

While Mansfield was a pioneering modernist, her writing was very accessible and she was critical of books that weren’t (she felt “stupefied” by Joyce’s Ulysses). She was also, exclusively, a short story writer, so if you dislike one of her inventions, it is easy to move on to another. The collection to start with is The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922 when she was at the peak of her powers. Her range and skill here is thrilling, from the lyricism of At the Bay and The Voyage to the waspish satire of Marriage à la Mode, the pathos of Life of Ma Parker or the surrealism of Miss Brill. The title story is one of her best known, told from the point of view of young Laura Sheridan, who is trying to do the right thing when a tragic accident threatens to disrupt a family party. There’s gaiety in it as well as genuine darkness, with the Edwardian middle-class world of the Sheridan family evoked in loving detail but undercut by events happening just off-stage. And the ending is wonderfully ambivalent, as it is so often in Mansfield’s work.

The one to make you laugh out loud

The Daughters of the Late Colonel always seems to me a perfect example of short fiction: clever, subtle, poignant and as satisfying as a whole novel. The title characters are two middle-aged spinsters whose overbearing father has just died, leaving them to take responsibility for themselves for the first time. Their hesitancy about everything – even simple tasks such as ordering food and sorting out their father’s things – are a source of droll humour throughout, but the scene where their nephew Cyril has to make small talk about meringues is one of the funniest ever, masterfully set up and executed. Mansfield loved performing and was a great mimic and raconteur, but she is never just funny; this story ends on a mystical note, with an overwhelming sense of the pathos of the sisters’ situation.

The one you’ll learn from

Mansfield’s journals were published soon after her death by her widower, John Middleton Murry, and made an enormous impression on the reading public (though he was also widely criticised for exposing too much of her private life). They are part-notebook, part-diary and completely fascinating; you don’t just witness a writer at work, but share her inmost thoughts, which are often quite harsh with herself and others (she thought Henry James’s novels, for example, contained “an extraordinary amount of pan and an amazingly raffiné flash”). One of Mansfield’s most impressive characteristics was her lack of complacency. She always wanted to develop and improve, which comes over strongly in the journals. Few writers are so dedicated to craft; she’d spend hours getting a paragraph right.

The one that deserves more attention

Mansfield led a reckless life in her teens and 20s, “going every sort of hog”, as Virginia Woolf remarked disapprovingly, in a frantic quest for experience. This resulted in unwanted pregnancies, illnesses and rejection by her family and Mansfield’s stories are full of girls in similar straits: impoverished, threatened or ostracised. Her decision to write about sex and its perils was bold and hasn’t been given enough attention. There are assaults and attempted rapes in Juliet, The Little Governess and His Sister’s Keeper, but a particularly shocking instance is in The Swing of the Pendulum, which appeared in Mansfield’s first book, In a German Pension, in 1911. Mansfield’s earliest biographer, Antony Alpers, found the story disturbing and excluded it from his 1984 collection on the grounds of “crudity”, so it hasn’t had much exposure and I’ve never seen it discussed by scholars. But if there was ever a #MeToo story a hundred years ahead of its time, it is this one: when consensual flirting turns quickly to non-consensual sex, the girl in the story shouts and struggles, only to be met with “an expression of the most absurd determination” from her attacker; “he did not even look at her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet’.”

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The masterpiece

Prelude is Mansfield’s longest and most ambitious story, a series of interconnected vignettes tracing a few days in the Burnell household following their move to a semi-rural suburb (the setting is based on one of Mansfield’s childhood homes in New Zealand). There’s no plot, no “closure”, no moral, but a powerful flow of ideas and impressions, shown by Mansfield to exist as much in everyday life as anywhere and in children’s minds as interestingly as in adults’. The term “stream of consciousness” hadn’t been invented when she wrote this story (begun in 1915), but Virginia Woolf, who commissioned it for the Hogarth Press and typeset the text, learned a lot from Mansfield’s startlingly novel techniques. The two women were almost friends in 1918-20 but wary of each other, being, as Mansfield said, “after very nearly the same thing”. When Mansfield died, Woolf admitted in her diary to “a shock of relief” at having lost her most serious rival.

If you’re left wanting more …

Mansfield published more than 100 short stories during her life, but died so young (aged 34) that you might well be left hankering for more. If so, try the letters. She wrote thousands of them in the years following her diagnosis with tuberculosis, when she was travelling almost constantly in search of better doctors and better climates. Beautifully edited in scholarly editions from both OUP and Edinburgh, they form a wonderfully immersive sort of autobiography, more upbeat than the journals (since she was almost always trying to put on a brave face on things) and full of wonderful descriptions of places, colours, sounds and light. Mansfield was superb at “noticings” (a word coined by one of her more unexpected fans, Philip Larkin); that great gift of immediacy makes you feel as if you are just there with her and the letters might in fact be addressed to you.