'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and moved to London in 1908. She was a regular contributor to the journal New Age and, in 1912, also began to write short stories for Rhythm, edited by her future husband, John Middleton Murry.

Her first collection of sharply satirical short stories, In a German Pension, was published to critical acclaim in 1911. Her story, 'Prelude', based on her New Zealand childhood, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1918.

Bliss, and Other Stories, published in 1920, confirmed her growing reputation as a writer of modernist fiction and her short stories were the first in English to show the influence of Chekhov.

Her third collection of short stories, The Garden Party, and Other Stories, the last to be published in her lifetime, appeared in 1922. Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at Fontainebleau in France in 1923.

'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' (from The Garden Party and Other Stories, Penguin) has been recommended by Jackie Kay.

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