TO
WALTER DE LA MARE
CONTENTS
| Introductory Note | [9] |
| The Doll’s House | [25] |
| Honeymoon | [39] |
| A Cup of Tea | [50] |
| Taking the Veil | [65] |
| The Fly | [74] |
| The Canary | [85] |
| Unfinished Stories: | |
| A Married Man’s Story | [92] |
| The Doves’ Nest | [117] |
| Six Years After | [147] |
| Daphne | [156] |
| Father and the Girls | [166] |
| All Serene! | [177] |
| A Bad Idea | [186] |
| A Man and His Dog | [191] |
| Such a Sweet Old Lady | [197] |
| Honesty | [202] |
| Susannah | [209] |
| Second Violin | [214] |
| Mr. and Mrs. Williams | [220] |
| Weak Heart | [227] |
| Widowed | [234] |
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Katherine Mansfield died at Fontainebleau on January 9th 1923, at the age of thirty-four.
This volume contains all the complete stories, and several fragments of stories, which she wrote at the same time as, or after, those published in “The Garden Party and Other Stories.” Her earlier work, belonging to the period between her first book, “In a German Pension,” and her second, “Bliss and Other Stories,” will be published in one or two separate volumes in a collected edition of her work. Thus the continuity of her writing will be preserved, and an opportunity given to those who care for such things to follow the development of a talent now generally recognised as among the rarest of her generation.
The title of this volume, “The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories,” is the title which Katherine Mansfield intended to give it. Whether the stories which compose it are those which she would finally have included in it, I cannot say. Her standard of self-criticism was continually changing, and changing always in the direction of a greater rigour. In writings which I thought perfect she, with her keener insight, discerned unworthy elements. Now that I am forced to depend upon my own sole judgment, it has seemed to me that there is not a scrap of her writing—not even the tiniest fragment—during this final period which does not bear the visible impress of her exquisite individuality and her creative power.
On October 27, 1921, soon after she had finished and sent to her publisher the stories which compose “The Garden Party,” she wrote the following plan of her new book in her journal. (The letters L. and N. Z. mean that the stories were to have London or New Zealand for their setting.)