CLASSIC SHORT STORY 5:

KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S ‘AT THE BAY’

Once or twice a week, and while submissions are open for the GBP Short Story Prize 2016/17, we'll be posting a classic short story for our friends and entrants to access freely (please follow the links at the end of the post).

This week Chris Power – short story writer, journalist, and author of The Guardian’s Brief Survey Of The Short Story, as well as one of this year’s judges for the GBP Prize - has suggested Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’. (‘At the Bay,’ he says, is probably his favourite Mansfield.)

First published in 1922 in the London Mercury, and later reprinted as part of 'The Garden Party and Other Stories', her second collection, ‘At the Bay’ is regarded as significant piece of modernism – undermining, as it does, traditional notions of structure, with a narrative that undergoes many shifts. 
Her contemporary, friend and rival, Virginia Woolf, called ‘At the Bay’, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

‘At the Bay’ is freely available to read on the Katherine Mansfield Society website, here.
 

An interesting interpretation of ‘At the Bay’, by Jonathan Guilford, can be found here.