SOURCE: Caserio, Robert L. “The Mansfield Moment.” Western Humanities Review 50, no. 4 (winter-spring 1997): 344-47.

In the following essay, Caserio outlines the defining characteristics of Mansfield's short fiction and discusses her status among English modernist authors.

Has the celebrated Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) lost a once formidable status among English modernists? In the past, her work was thought of as equal to Lawrence's and Woolf's (she was intimate with them in her brief life); and her writing sounds now like Lawrence's (as in “The Garden-Party” [1922] and “The Doll's House” [1922]), and now like Woolf's (as in “Prelude” [1918] and “Psychology” [1920]). Perhaps it is she who they sound like. Woolf owes much of the form and tone of her fiction about family life to Mansfield's stories about Mansfield's family—especially to “Prelude”; but the Woolf revival of the last thirty years has eclipsed the influence. Mansfield has decisive originality, in spite of crowding by...