Anton Chekhov and
Katherine Mansfield

Tales x 2

Katherine Mansfield’s first short story to be published in England appeared in the fashionable literary journal The New Age, in February 1910. Mansfield wrote “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” the year before, at age twenty, while she was living in Germany, where she’d been sent to a spa by her mother to recover from emotional entanglements. The story brought Mansfield immediate literary recognition in London and in 1911 led to publication of her first collection, In a German Pension, one of three collections totaling forty-one stories published in her lifetime. She died of tuberculosis in 1923, at age thirty-four. Her stories, modest in volume, strongly influenced subsequent generations and have remained continuously in print. Her talent lay in her stylistic control; in the way she experimented with time, dialogue, ironic technique, and language choices; in her synthesis of intelligence and senses to reveal moments of insight and regret, desire and pain, in the lives of her characters.