SOMETHING CHILDISH and Other Stories.
London: Constable & Co., (1924). Original grey cloth stamped in violet, with dust jacket.
First Edition, second and usual issue (a very few copies, once pegged at 34 in number, were first issued without the "First Published, 1924" on the title page verso). Knopf's American edition, published the same year, was titled THE LITTLE GIRL. This posthumous collection of 25 stories includes writings from as early as 1908 (when the New Zealand native was only 19). The title story, actually "Something Childish but very Natural," is a tale of young love beginning with a chance encounter of two teenagers on a commuter train, replete with the proper awkwardness and ultimately the intrusion of fate. (She wrote it in 1914, when she and John Middleton Murry were living penniless in France; after she died in 1923 at age 34, it was he who had his wife's book published (in his Introductory Note he says "I have no doubt that Katherine Mansfield, were she still alive, would not have suffered some of these stories to appear").
This is a fine copy, in a just-about-fine dust jacket (a hint of wear at a couple of corners). Kirkpatrick A8a. Item #14754
Price: $275.00