In a German Pension: Thirteen Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born in New Zealand and lived in England and Europe. She wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield and is arguably New Zealand’s most famous writer. She died very early in the age of 34 of tuberculosis. “In a German Pension” was her first book of short stories and was published in 1911. These stories were inspired by Mansfield's stay in a Bavarian spa, where her mother sent her in 1909 after a series of sexual explorations resulted in an "unsuitable" marriage and a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock. Most of the thirteen stories in this collection portray interactions among pension guests in a German spa town.