The only full length work by this master of the short story, and the basis for one of her most famous stories
Linda Burnell dreams, listless and distant, while downstairs her mother sets in order the family's new home in the New Zealand countryside. Her vigorous and exhausting husband, Stanley, is at the office, but will return with eager and admiring eyes. Her children prepare lunch on a concrete step and her sister sings love songs to an imaginary young man. This book which Katherine Mansfield wrote to crystallize the memories of her childhood was eventually, when Virginia Woolf asked for a story for her new Hogarth Press, reworked to become her acclaimed Prelude. But the original is very different—in style, detail, and texture—giving readers a wonderful short novel in its own right. The text has been prepared by Vincent O'Sullivan, the renowned Mansfield scholar and editor of The Selected Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
