The Montana Stories

Author(s): Katherine Mansfield

Location(s): London, New Zealand (Aotearoa), The South of France (Le Midi)

Genre(s): Short Stories

Era(s): Early 1920s

Location

Content

Eighty years ago, at the end of May 1921, Katherine Mansfield came to Switzerland, to live at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana (now Crans-Montana) in Switzerland. She was 32 and seriously ill with tuberculosis (possibly caught, according to her biographer Claire Tomalin from DH Lawrence). The next few months were to be the most fruitful period of her life; she did not have much time left to her.

The Montana Stories is a new edition compiled and edited by Persephone Books of everything Katherine Mansfield wrote between July 1921 and the end of January 1922 when she went to Paris for medical treatment. For completeness there are also the two stories and an unfinished fragment that she wrote after she left Montana and before her death in January 1923; but the large proportion of her output during her final working months was written in the chalet shown on the frontispiece of the book.

Physically Katherine Mansfield was in Montana, lying either in bed or on a chair on the balcony; in her imagination she was in London, in the South of France and, in particular, in the New Zealand of her girlhood. It was as if the view over the mountains was a catalyst that gave the impetus to her writing.

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