The Doves' Nest, and Other Stories

The last stories, several unfinished — a family at breakfast in the south of France with a secret in the post, a dead husband's letters, a woman looking at a canary's empty cage. Mansfield left New Zealand at nineteen, remade the English short story working almost entirely in this form, and died of tuberculosis at thirty-four; her husband published these fragments after her death, breaks and all, which is how they should be read. Fifty-three plates of reading, lamplight and quiet interiors by Manet, Munch and their contemporaries, painted between 1846 and 1922, keep these last stories company.