At the Bay

"The other ladies consider her ‘very, very fast. Her lack of vanity, her slang, the way she treated men as though she was one of them, and the fact that she didn’t care twopence about her house and called the servant Gladys ‘Glad-eyes’, was disgraceful." Like her friend Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway‘ (1925), ‘At the Bay’ (1922) by Katherine Mansfield covers a single day from different points of view. In this beautifully written short story filled with rich characters and vivid imagery, we visit or revisit the Burnell family in a story about nothing and everything. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was short story writer and poet from New Zealand, who settled in England at the age of 19. Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were among her literary friends and admirers. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.