“Six-shilling novels”: Katherine Mansfield and the short story cycle

The short story cycle played an important role in the early work of Katherine Mansfield. Her first published collection of stories (1911) was an overt story cycle, with the stories set in Bavaria, in a specific location. During 1912-13, Mansfield published five stories, which all had a common theme of life in colonial New Zealand, but written with a postcolonial mindset, and in a modernist style that she would hone to perfection in her later stories. Modernism did not arrive in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century as a ready-made concept. It was a response to a variety of stimuli – cultural, political, historical, literary and scientific. In the case of Mansfield, the cultural landscape she had grown up with in New Zealand and chose to dislocate herself from, enabled her to view modernity from a postcolonial viewpoint. In the story cycle discussed in this paper, she merged both concepts, as she experimented and honed her skills as a writer. Modernism’s early desire for the ‘raw’ and the ‘savage’ brought memories of Mansfield’s homeland to the fore, enabling her to depict a darker underbelly to the previously accepted notion of colonialism: what we now, of course, call postcolonialism. This cycle thus represents an important early phase in Mansfield’s development as one of Britain’s key exponents of literary modernism.