That Katherine Mansfield, one of the initiators of the modern short story, was from New Zealand is quite a stroke of luck. That would mean I’ll be having two entries (the other is Torgny Lindgren’s The Way of a Serpent) for the Global Voices Book Challenge, the condition of which is to read a book from a country whose literature one haven’t read before.
To be quick about it, In a German Pension is Mansfield’s first collection of short stories published in 1911. Hesperus Press’ book description sums up the thin volume as follows:
A young Englishwoman, staying in a Bavarian spa town to ‘make the cure’, is forced into the company of her dislikeable fellow-guests. Amused by their bourgeois prejudices and revolted by their carnal preoccupations, she walks her own path through the public world of the German middle classes.
The heroine is castigated for not producing ‘handfuls of babies’; a wife remembers the naivety and terror of her wedding night; young girls are worked to death by their pregnant mistresses and dream of young men – or of sleep. Women are the main focus of Mansfield’s penetrating gaze: their pretensions and self-delusions and their private moments of despair and triumph; her men are boors or dupes capable of offering only violence senseless devotion, or the slavery of marriage and childbirth.
All of which, apart from its incredible insights into the condition of women in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, makes Mansfield’s narrator quite literally the original gossip girl in which the present popular TV series pales in comparison. Well, maybe not really the original… There was Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, Lady Murasaki who penned The Tale of Genji, the ever popular Jane Austen, and so on.
Anyhow, Linda Grant provides an example of Mansfield’s gossip-girlesque nastiness in the foreword:
A young woman sits in the garden of a German pension in the first decade of the last century trying to write a poem. Dissatisfied with her imagery she eavesdrop on a piar of lovers (a student from Bonn and the sister of a baroness), hoping she will hear something she can filch. The student, she understands, must do his utmost to woo the high-born lady: ‘he had hitherto relied upon three scars and a ribbon to produce an effect, but the sister of a baroness demanded more than these.’ The young poetess has high hopes. A pair of hands, she hears, is like ‘white lilies lying on the pool of your black dress.’ This sounds promising. Next, the prospect of a kiss is raised, but must be dismissed: ‘”…you know I am suffering from severe nasal catarrh, and I dare not risk giving it to you. Sixteen times last night did I count myself sneezing. And three different handkerchiefs.”‘ Even worse, over the page we find a case of mistaken identity: the lady in question is the baroness’ dressmaker. ■
(Mis)readings