Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Katherine Mansfield
-
Standard Name: Mansfield, Katherine
Birth Name: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
Nickname: Wig
Nickname: Kissienka
Married Name: Kathleen Mansfield Murry
Self-constructed Name: Katherine Mansfield
Pseudonym: Katherine Mansfield
Pseudonym: K. M.
Pseudonym: Boris Petrovsky
KM
's life was short and much of her writing experimental or oriented towards earning. Though contemporary reviewers sometimes condescended to her youth, gender, and magazine publication, she is now seen as one of our great modernists, her innovations so familiar as to be unnoticeable.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, pp. 25-6.
25
As well as one of the most interesting and original short-story writers of the Modernist movement, she was a significant letter-writer and diarist. Her poetry, too, is of interest. Claire Tomalin remarked that her diary in particular has made her a cult figure for young women.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
VM
met Lawrence
through Ivy Low
. Enthusiastic about his writing, she offered to lend him her cottage and to do his typing. During his stay on the Meynells' property, Lawrence introduced Viola to Ottoline Morrell
The relationship between DB
and Katherine Mansfield
appears to have been one of mutual support, each engaging deeply with the other's work. Brett credits Mansfield with the beginning of her artistic career, She gave me...
Friends, Associates
Ling Shuhua
The group's founders emphasised exchanges between Asian and British literary cultures; they named it after Rabindrath Tagore
's prose-poem collection The Crescent Moon (1903), after they brought Tagore
to Beijing via the Society for Lectures on the New Learning
Brett, Dorothy. Lawrence and Brett. J. B. Lippincott Company.
39-40
On the whole, however, she did not pursue literary friendships in the USA. She continued her...
Fictionalization
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
inspired a number of creative portraits by her contemporaries during the earlier part of her career. Probably the best-known is the character of Mrs Failing in E. M. Forster
's novel The Longest Journey...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Brett
DB
's younger sister, Sylvia, later Lady Brooke
, born in 1885, is herself of no minor literary significance. She authored numerous works including two autobiographies, romance novels, and short stories, and claimed J. M. Barrie
Family and Intimate relationships
Ada Leverson
AL
's three sisters all married socially prominent Jewish husbands.
Speedie, Julie. Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson. Virago.
239-40
Family and Intimate relationships
Fleur Adcock
She later wrote, Marrying was what we did in those days.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
She also told an interviewer that she had seen her husband across a crowded room and snapped him up for his physical beauty. He...
Family and Intimate relationships
Tillie Olsen
Their next child (also, as the nurses said, just a girl) was born on 17 November 1943. She was named Katherine Jo Olsen for Käthe Kollwitz
, Katherine Mansfield
, Kate Kennedy
(a pioneer of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
made contact with Katherine Mansfield
after discovering through Frank Swinnerton
that Mansfield was a New Zealand cousin, formerly named Kathleen Beauchamp. A friendship ensued.
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head.
217
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Brett
As well as sharing a house in Hampstead for some time with her close and loyal friend Mansfield
, DB
lived for a while with Mark Gertler
as her lodger (who, however, was not her...
Education
Rumer Godden
RG
's determination to become a writer fuelled a continued self-education. Books were hard to come by in India, yet she managed to find and devour recent publications: Edith Sitwell
's Troy Park and Façade...