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, 12 Apr. 2013, 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/.
"Katherine Mansfield, in profile" by Bettmann,1900-01-02.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/katherine-mansfield-british-writer-photograph-news-photo/514882402.
With four books of verse behind her, SM
issued her ambitious first novel, entitled Blind Men Crossing a Bridge, and dedicated to Katherine Mansfield
.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Education
Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters
, Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield
and Gertrude Stein
. Isak Dinesen
was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1975.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
808
Education
Philip Larkin
For ten years from 1930, as both a primary and a secondary-school student, PL
attended King Henry VIII School
in Coventry (now an independent school for both sexes, but founded in the sixteenth century as...
Education
Tillie Olsen
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
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...
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, 1993.
239-40
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
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
Fleur Adcock
She later wrote, Marrying was what we did in those days.
qtd. in
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, 1990.
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
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...
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, 1986.
217
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...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
and Katherine Mansfield
first met; before this Woolf had asked Lytton Strachey
to arrange a meeting between them.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan, 1989.
35
Friends, Associates
Dora Carrington
At a party given by Dorothy Brett
at her Hampstead studio, DC
met and began a friendship with Katherine Mansfield
.
Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. Alfred Knopf, 1988.
139-40
Friends, Associates
Viola Meynell
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
Timeline
1907: Alfred Richard Orage and Holbrook Jackson...
Kindley, Evan. “Ismism”. London Review of Books, Vol.
36
, No. 2, 23 Jan. 2014, pp. 33-5.
34
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Orage
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
From early summer 1915: Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the home of...
Building item
From early summer 1915
Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the home of Lady Ottoline
and Philip Morrell
, became a centre for many pacifists, conscientious objectors, and non-pacifist critics of the war.
Berkman, Joyce Avrech. Pacifism in England, 1914-1939. Yale University, 1967, http://U of A HSS.
23
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
223-4
1951: New Zealander Janet Frame published her first...
Writing climate item
1951
New Zealander Janet Frame
published her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) as a patient at Seacliff Psychiatric Hospital
: her emotional breakdown in 1947 had been mis-diagnosed as schizophrenia.
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, 1990.
1952: The seventy-eight-year-old Somerset Maugham...
Writing climate item
1952
The seventy-eight-year-old Somerset Maugham
confided to his former headmaster that he believed that the Order of Merit was something that they ought to award him, as the greatest living writer of English.
Tayler, Christopher. “I only want the OM”. London Review of Books, 1 Sept. 2005, pp. 19-22.
19
Texts
Mansfield, Katherine. Bliss and Other Stories. 1st ed., Constable, 1920.
Mansfield, Katherine. In a German Pension. Stephen Swift, 1911.
Mansfield, Katherine. Je ne parle pas français. 1st ed., Heron Press, 1920.
Mansfield, Katherine. Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable and Company, 1927.
Mansfield, Katherine. Novels & Novelists. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Beacon Press, 1930.
Mansfield, Katherine. Poems. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable and Company, 1923.
Mansfield, Katherine. Prelude. 1st ed., Hogarth Press, 1918, http://U of A Special Collections.
Mansfield, Katherine. Something Childish and Other Stories. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable, 1924, http://U of A HSS.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Short Stories. Penguin, 1981.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable and Company, 1923.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Garden Party and Other Stories. Constable and Company, 1922.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. Editor Scott, Margaret, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 2 vols.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable and Company, 1928, 2 vol.