In a German Pension Book

There was a time when I had lost all interest in Jane Austen, resigned to accepting the self-assured utterances of a few male acquaintances who still continue to believe that she wrote nothing other than classical 'chick-lit'. (My ignorant, younger self hadn't thought of asking them what was wrong with 'chick lit' in the first place) But a reading of A Room of One's Own and a re-reading of Pride & Prejudice later, I was tempted to literally beat some sense into those bluntheads (with a brick-sized omnibus edition of JA's works preferably) who had caused me to momentarily stray from my earlier path of fangirlish enthusiasm.

A female voice with a dignified sense of humor and impeccable comic timing is a rarity in the hallowed halls of literature still; a female voice with the ability to comment on the power imbalance in gender relations and small quotidian societal injustices under the veneer of wry humor even more so.

Katherine Mansfield, who put together this excellent collection of short stories nearly a century after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, reminds me of Austen in the sense that her mockery of stiff-upper-lipped high society German ladies and barons is a throwback to Austen's keen talent of zeroing in on individual character quirks and highlighting the constant need for validation through assertion of material prosperity. But this is where the parallels end.

The last few short stories in this collection astonish with their thematic depth despite their brevity. Issues of rabid sexism, domestic disharmony, marital rape, thwarted attempts at sexual assault, the bodily violence of childbirth, abuse of young children employed as servants are touched on in the subtlest of ways. These grim realities were, perhaps, not unknown to JA but who, nonetheless, steered clear of them in her romantic comedies. The fact that Mansfield wrote these stories while quietly living out the ignominy of childbearing out of wedlock in a foreign country should be kept in mind while dissecting the rather no-holds-barred approach she adopts while exposing human foibles.
"I suppose it's the savage pride of the female who likes to think the man to whom she has given herself must be a very great chief indeed."
It's a pity of monumental proportions that the 22-year old who wrote with such insight didn't live long enough to hone her craft to absolute perfection or to leave enough of a mark on the literary landscape of her times like her much venerated contemporaries. But then there's the consolation that she wrote at all.