The Short Stories
Mansfield and Joyce were the twin inventors of modernist short fiction; she came at it from the lyrical, impressionistic side. Her stories of colonial experience, gender, and class anticipate Woolf's interiority. "The Garden Party" is one of the great stories.
Read straight through instead of dipped into, the Mansfield stories start to blend: one reviewer says flatly there “wasn't anything particularly unique about them”, and another describes “tired recurring plot devices and settings become laborious to get through”. The famous anthology pieces overshadow the rest of the roughly 470-page volume, and the lesser-known stories read to disappointed readers like “fumbling attempts at crafting another The Garden Party or Miss Brill”. Mansfield's narrating voice is the other sticking point; more than one reader names the condescending tone as the specific reason they can't stand her fiction, and the unfinished late fragments included here land thin next to the finished work. At its flattest the collection reads, in one reviewer's words, like “a grey cloud of banal social commentary”.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
