Stories

Although Katherine Mansfield was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf, her stories suggest someone writing in a different era and in a vastly different English. Her language is as transparent as clean glass, yet hovers on the edge of poetry. Her characters are passionate men and women swaddled in English reserve — and sometimes briefly breaking through. And her genius is to pinpoint those unacknowledged and almost imperceptible moments in which thos…