Bliss, and Other Stories

A woman gives a dinner party, feels an inexplicable happiness all evening, and learns something at the end of it that costs her the feeling for good. Mansfield left New Zealand at nineteen, remade the English short story almost single-handed, and wrote most of these while dying of tuberculosis; Virginia Woolf said hers was the only writing she was ever jealous of. Fifty-seven plates, among them Sickert and Philip de László, gather the London streets, music rooms and draped interiors of Mansfield's own milieu.