The Doves' Nest* Katherine Mansfield Explains Us to Ourselves
A collection of 21 short stories, six completed, the other 15 left unfinished at the death of their author. The stories are all brief—five, six, eight pages; the longest one, The Doves'Nest (unfinished) runs as many as 15. They have no trimly tailored tightness of plot—cannon cracker climaxes—in fact it is doubtful whether any of our best paying and most financially successful American magazines would consider them worth the buying. And yet they add, if anything, to a reputation that already belongs among the permanent things of English literature—a reputation sustained entirely by exactly such work as this.
What is there left to analyze, then, when one tries to pull them apart? A mood—a moment—a fragrance— sorrow—joy—a living man, a living woman, suddenly, completely seen.
The Stories. The Doll's House deals with a wonderful doll's house given to some moderately well-to-do children. They treasure it—show it off to all their school friends except the little Kelveys, the washerwoman's daughters. Then one day the Kelveys do see it—and are almost instantly scolded away by a proper grownup. But they have seen it. The children in The Doll's House live and breathe—Katherine Mansfield told a little about them but not nearly all.
In Taking the Veil, 18-year-old Edna is very unhappy. She thought she loved Jimmy, but last night she went to the theatre and fell in love with an actor. Of course the only thing left for her to do is to take the veil. Then she realizes as she pictures a death in the odor of sanctity that she really does love Jimmy after all.
In The Fly a man kills a fly; in A Cup of Tea, Rosemary Fell, young, wealthy, plays lady bountiful to a starving girl and takes her home for tea. Her husband comments casually that the girl is really astonishingly pretty and Rosemary gives her money and sends her away at once.
You see? No ginger! No big thumping words! No potency!
The Significance. Life seen with exquisite clarity, subtlety, thoughtfulness, humor, sometimes with scorn or sorrow, but never with spite or despair. Unerring felicity of word and line—work so beautifully, unobtrusively apt and accomplished that beside it most contemporary prose seems careless and shoddy. And yet the technique is not all—is merely an instrument—is never brittle—the insight pierces deep and is very clear. A world built up of tiny, crystalline fragments—but a world that will remain when many great fictional constellations now spinning in the literary void have expired like wet fireworks.
The Critics. John Galsworthy: "Her talent was unique among us. . . . her work stirs and excites us, and so quietly; it is an expression of the mood in love with life. It has the rare flavor that endures. Beautiful work! "
H. G. Wells: " K. M.'s perfectly lovely mind has lit a whole dismal day for me. . . . I put K. M. above the world of effort and compromise."
The Christian Science Monitor: " A treasury of riches. One reads and marvels. ... Her writing is of that exquisite, subtle insight that explains us to ourselves."