At A Lunar Eclipse-Thomas Hardy

The imagination responsible for these remarkable stories, the third and final collection published in Mansfield's lifetime, is clearly living with one foot firmly planted in this life, even if her other is already reaching tentatively across a gloomy chasm to the next. Unsurprisingly, given the perilous state of the young author's health at the time Mansfield wrote them, many of these stories allude to that strange transformative process we call 'death'. And yet — and this is really quite a miracle — their net effect is actually extraordinarily uplifting. (Summary by Peter Dann)