Bliss and Other Stories
By Katherine Mansfield
There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage, they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was complete, and Linda Burnell could not have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handyman on the driver’s seat. Holdalls, bags, and boxes were piled on the floor. “These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,” said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement. Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate, ready for the fray in their coats, with brass anchor buttons, little round caps, and battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round, solemn eyes, first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother. “We shall simply have to leave them. That is all.
We shall have to cast them off,” said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back against the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes, her lips trembling with laughter. Happily, at that moment, Mrs. Samuel Josephs, who had been watching the scene from behind her drawing-room blind, shuffled down the garden path. “Why not leave the children with me for the afternoon, Brs. Burnell? They could go on the dray with the storeman when he comes in the evading. Those things on the path have to go, don’t they?” “Yes, everything outside the house is supposed to go,” said Linda Burnell, waving a white hand at the tables and chairs standing on their heads on the front lawn. How absurd they looked! Either they ought to be the other way up, or Lottie and Kezia should stand on their heads, too. And she longed to say: “Stand on your heads, children, and wait for the storeman.” It seemed to her that it would be so exquisitely funny that she could not attend to Mrs. Samuel Josephs.
Genre: Short Story Collection | Gay/Lesbian
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Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic considered an essential author of the modernist movement.
Biography
Her works are celebrated worldwide and have been published in 25 languages. Born and raised in a house on Tinakori Road in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon, Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family. She began school in Karori with her sisters before attending Wellington Girls’ College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahupuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship. Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality, and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity.
When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and others in the Bloomsbury Group’s orbit. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34.
Katherine Mansfield
