At the Bay

A brilliant modernist classic--now available for the first time in a stand-alone edition

This dreamy, formally audacious story of a summer's day in the life of one family is a small masterpiece by Katherine Mansfield, hailed as "one of the great modernist writers. Virginia Woolf said of Mansfield, hers was "the only writing I have ever been jealous of."

A modernist master of cool precision and extraordinary delicacy, Mansfield wrote about family life with a sharp radicalism, and At the Bay is one of her greatest works. Told in thirteen parts, beginning early in the morning and ending at dusk, At the Bay captures both the Burnell family's intricate web of relatives and friends, and the dreamy, unassuming natural beauty of Crescent Bay.

Haunting but ever understated, At the Bay is as timeless novella, and a testament to Mansfield's remarkable powers.

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888. She moved to London in 1903, to attend college, and settled there in 1908. In 1910, she began to contribute articles to The New Age, and the following year, she published her first collection, In a German Pension. Mansfield was close to a number of her fellow modernists, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was published in 1921, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year later. It was the last book to be published in her lifetime: after contracting tuberculosis in 1917, she died six years later, in 1923.