Something Childish and Other Stories

First edition. Second issue with "First published, 1924" on the copyright page. Sm. crown 8vo, pp. ix, [1], 258, [1]. Greyish-green cloth lettered and lined in blue to front and spine. Preceded by an edition of 34 copies issued "as travellers' samples, sent to Australia, or given for early review," [Kirkpatrick A8a]. Published in October 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S as The Little Girl and Other Stories.

With former owner's Christine Knowles' (1890 – 1965) striking lithographic bookplate to front pastedown, and ephemera loosely laid-in. A merchant's daughter, Knowles was a Red Cross volunteer, following both World Wars, who was awarded an OBE for her services in 1919. Sans dustwrapper. Text-block edges dust-soiled and foxed, hinges starting, light offsetting to endpapers, else Very Good.

A posthumous collection of twenty-five stories and sketches mostly written between the publication of her first book, In a German Pension (1911) and her second, Bliss and Other Stories (1920); with the earliest story here written in 1908, at the age of 19. In the two-page Introductory Note her widower, John Middleton Murry, states, "I have no doubt that Katherine Mansfield, were she still alive, would not have suffered some of these stories to appear". The two of them were the inspiration for the characters of Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920).

Born and raised in New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis in 1923, at the age of thirty-four, after seeking unorthodox methods of treatment on mainland Europe. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, she was regarded by Virginia Woolf as her only serious rival.

[Kirkpatrick A8a; Mantz, A9.a]