In a German Pension

First edition. First impression. N.d. [1911]. Small crown 8vo. Pp. 251, [1], 4 (publisher's adverts., integral), 32 (publisher's catalogue at rear). Dark green ribbed cloth blocked in blind to upper cover and stamped in gilt to spine and front.

Author's rare first book, published by Stephen Swift on 11 December 1911 in an edition of 500 copies. A further two impressions of 500 each followed in January, and May or June of 1912. Over the years, many reasons for its extreme scarcity have been advanced. For some time it was believed the bulk of the edition had gone down with the Titanic but it seems likely that the publisher's insolvency had more to do with it. In October 1912, Charles Granville (Stephen Swift was an alias) went bankrupt and fled, leaving authors like Belloc, Katherine Mansfield, and Ezra Pound, among others, in the lurch. (He was eventually caught and jailed for fraud and bigamy).

Paid an advance of £15 in royalties, the subsequent liquidation saddled Mansfield with an enormous debt – £400 – owed to the company's printers. Seven copies appear in Book Auction records between 1931 and 1944, then no further copies for forty years when in 1984 John Middleton Murry's copy was sold for £550 at Sotheby's. Mansfield had married Murry in 1918. Not published in the U.S. until 1926.

Top two centimetres of front free end-paper skilfully and professionally restored with some light foxing to front preliminaries, else a nice, bright copy; bookseller's stamp on front and rear end-papers.

Thirteen sketches and stories, written after Mansfield's 1909 stay in the German spa town of Bad Wörishofen, whilst recuperating from her disastrous marriage and miscarriage. Satirising the Germans as boorish and chauvinistic, the collection struck a chord with British readers at a time of a rumoured German invasion.

'The Child-Who-Was-Tired', which had already appeared in the New Age, and describes the suffocation of a baby by an exhausted nursemaid, became the subject of heated correspondence in the pages of the TLS in 1951, and led to accusations of plagiarism. The story arc closely follows that of Chekhov's short story 'Sleepy'. 'Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding,' a chilling portrayal of a village woman's subjugation to her husband, is considered the best story in the collection.

Mansfield was diagnosed with extra-pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, which led to her death six years later at the tragically early age of thirty-four. "A born short story writer, observant, economical and astringent, demanding rediscovery. ...New Zealand's only offering to our avant-garde." –Cyril Connolly

[Kirkpatrick A1a; Mantz 2; Georgian Bloomsbury: Volume 3: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, 1910–1914, by S. Rosenbaum; Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View, by Jeffey Meyers; Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914, by Faith Binckes]