SOURCE: Dunbar, Pamela. Preface to Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories, pp. ix-xv. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997.

In the following excerpt, Dunbar considers various influences on Mansfield's short fiction and discusses her contribution to the modernist short story.

In January 1921, just two years before she died, Katherine Mansfield wrote to a painter-friend: ‘I try and make family life so gorgeous—not hatred and linoleum—but warmth and hydrangeas.’¹

Yet beneath the ‘hydrangeas’—the material prosperity, the emotional fulfilment, the sense of contentment conveyed by such well-known pieces as ‘Prelude’, ‘The Garden-Party’, or ‘The Doll's House’—there is a persistent sense of malaise; a preoccupation with alienation, with premature death, with sexual maladjustment; above all a disposition to challenge received assumptions about human relationships and the nature of individual identity.

Mansfield then is far from being the ‘safe’ writer the lyrical surfaces of her...