"A Feather of Breath"

December 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Katharine Mansfield at the woefully early age of 34. I loved her short stories when I read them more than four decades ago and I’m listening to them again before , I hope, listening to Claire Harman’s book Katharine Mansfield All sorts of lives published to coincide with the anniversary. It is not yet listed on Audible, but as I can no longer read print, I’m very much hoping it will be!

A bonus on this Penguin Classic version of Mansfield’s short stories on audio is the substantial authoritative and discerning introduction written by Lorna Sage (the academic critic who also died before her time in 2001 at the age of 58).

You can read /listen to Katharine Mansfield’s stories many times and find some little detail you had forgotten or missed , and if you re-read after many years you’ll respond differently to themes and scenarios . It is astonishing how this young writer could have created with such empathy and startling reality the whole range of people and their inter-relationships, embracing children, men and women of all ages and social classes . No wonder Virginia Woolf was jealous of her!

I love Katharine Mansfield’s children: the little girl reprimanded for making rivers in her porridge and then carefully eating the banks, the young boy on the beach keeping a starfish in his hanky to tame later. She understands single women who never had a chance to meet a possible husband yet still retain their fragile sense of self worth as they tend a cantankerous old father , or chaperone a pretty young thing still young enough to be excited by her first ball. She understands many sorts of love and there is joy and laughter. How does young Mansfield understand old people so well? Old Mr Neave feels numbed all over and ‘too old to meet the Spring’ , whilst Fenella’s feisty old grandmother embarks on a sea journey with her granddaughter who sees her wriggling and wiggling out of her stays and hears the tissue paper crinkling sound of her whispering her prayers. Like Virginia Woolf she creates the upper classes, but unlike her she shows them in all their distasteful vacuous, careless vanity: Mrs Sheridan , despite pleading from her daughter, will go ahead with her Garden Party after a father from the ‘squalid’ cottages close by has just been thrown from his horse and killed And there are heart-rending portraits of impoverished misfortune as in poor Mrs Parker, having buried seven of her children , now looking after an oblivious and slovenly ‘literary gentleman’. Mansfield is always gentle, subtle like the ‘feather of breath’ felt in the air.

The whole sweep is created in brilliant cameos lit with few words as though she is painting with colours and shades. The sea in its varying moods and shifting colours moves through many of these stories whilst flowers and trees form a textured and minutely observed background. The green branches weighed down by rain ‘ bowed down as though they had been visited by an Archangel’ – not just an angel, but an Archangel – a typical uplifting touch. I loved the detail of the very deaf old Colonel cupping his dry hand ‘like a purple meringue’ over his ear .

The narrator Bonnie Wright has a pleasant voice BUT there are SO MANY mispronunciations throughout which constantly irritate and spoil the whole. Conjuror, twopence, impudent, primus stove, ilex tree, ermine, nasturtiums, blanc mange and wan are just a few examples.

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Great Stories, not always well read

Katherine Mansfield is (arguably) the greatest short story writer in English, and this collection is some of her finest compositions, so you can be sure the content of this audiobook is very good

Bonnie Wright however, although she generally does a reasonable job, is not great in a couple of the stories. In her reading of the opener "At the Bay" it seems that she was recording without having previously read the story - in quite a few places the pace, tone or emphasis just seem wrong. And in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" she has a very weird pronunciation of the name 'Constantia' which jars throughout and ruins what is one of Mansfield's masterpieces. There are a few other odd pronunciations of words across the whole recording.

One other point is that for some reason there is no chapter break in the recording between the first story "At the Bay" and the second "The Garden Party" -which is annoying if you want to listen to each of the stories individually.

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6 people found this helpful

poor narration. Mispronunciations and phrasing were very distracting making it hard to stay tuned in

the narration was poor. mispronunciations and sometimes the illogical phrasing of sentences by the narrator made it hard to follow. I gave up.

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