Mansfield as Innovator of the Modernist Short Story

Abstract

Like painting in watercolours, short story writing may seem a deceptively easy task for those who have not attempted it, and this goes part way to explain the dismissive tone taken by so many critics towards the genre. H. E. Bates was an early critic who understood this difficulty: ‘[t]he short story is the most difficult and exacting of all prose forms; it cannot be treated as a spare-time occupation; and above all it must not be allowed to foster the illusion […] that its very brevity makes it easy to do’.1 Clare Hanson makes the claim that the short story has often been the ‘chosen form of the exile […] who longs to return to a home country which is denied him/her’, Mansfield’s work being an obvious example of this tenet.2 She continues: I would suggest that the short story has been from its inception a particularly appropriate vehicle for the expression of the ex-centric, alienated vision of women. It is striking, for example to see the way in which the early ‘modern’ short story, in the form of the psychological sketch was taken over by women writers during the era of the New Women of the 1880s and 1890s.3