What can you do if you are thirty and, suddenly, turning the corner of your own
street, you feel perfectly happy, as if you had swallowed a piece of the late autumn sun?
Berthas feelings show her love of the moment and her satisfaction with her
home, her family and her interesting circle of friends. Yet pain is not far away.
Before the day is over, Bertha's safe, happy world has been destroyed and she faces
an uglier, crueller reality.
In the other stories in this book, we are shown other uncomfortable
comparisons: the way a music teacher behaves towards his pupils and towards his
own family; the friendliness which richer children show towards each other and the
cruelty with which they treat poor ones; the way in which one neighbouring family
gives an expensive party and the other is affected by a sudden death.
Katherine Mansfield is now recognized as one of the greatest short story
writers in the English language but she had a difficult life and was often unhappy.
She was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 but went to London when she
was fourteen and lived the rest of her life in Europe. She married John Middleton
Murry, an important journalist and critic. Through him she met other famous writers,
such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Her best-known collections of short
stories are Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stones
(1922). However, she had serious health problems. She died of tuberculosis in
France in 1923, at the early age of thirty-five.