Audiobook · read by volunteers
At the Bay
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 2 chapters · 1 h 29
About the book
A summer morning on the coast of New Zealand, and a household slowly wakes. The mist lifts from the bay, the men hurry off to bathe and to the office, and the women and children are left to a long day on the beach and in the garden. Katherine Mansfield moves from one mind to the next, from a mother weary of being needed to a child absorbed in play, from a lonely bachelor to a restless young woman, and by evening the whole community has been shown to us in small, precise, luminous touches. Nothing dramatic is announced, yet a great deal is felt. The story is among the longest in her celebrated collection and a masterpiece of the modern short story. Two parts, ninety minutes, and the pleasure of a writer who notices everything and explains almost nothing.
Introduction
Katherine Mansfield, born in 1888 and dead in 1923, was one of the leading Modernist writers of short fiction in English. Born in New Zealand, she spent most of her adult life in Europe, and she wrote with a delicate, exact attention to feeling and to the small gesture that reveals it. Her career was brief, cut short by illness when she was only thirty-four, but its influence on the short story has been lasting.
At the Bay was published in 1922, in the collection The Garden Party and Other Stories, and it is among the best loved of her works. Like much Modernist writing it dispenses with a tightly driven plot. Instead it follows a single day through a series of loosely connected scenes, shifting its viewpoint from person to person and letting the atmosphere of the place, the sea, the light, the changing hours, do much of the work. Readers often note how closely it draws on the landscapes and family life of her childhood in New Zealand.
This recording is read by LibriVox volunteers and divided into two parts, together lasting about an hour and a half. It is a fine introduction to Mansfield for anyone who has not met her, and a rewarding return for those who have.
Why listen now? Because the story rewards slow attention. Heard aloud, its rhythms and its shifts of mood become more apparent, and it is easy to see why writers and readers have admired it for a century.
Public domain
Katherine Mansfield died in 1923: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text