Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, settled in London in 1908 and became one of the masters of the modern short story. She married the critic John Middleton Murry, to whom this book is dedicated. Ill with tuberculosis from 1917, she wrote much of her best work in France and Switzerland and died at Fontainebleau at thirty-four.
“Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply.”
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera.
