Katherine Mansfield

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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/.
Black and white photograph of Katherine Mansfield, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a knitted cardigan with a V-neck and a broad collar, over a light shirt. She has chin-length dark hair and bangs.
Black-and-white portrait photo of Katherine Mansfield. She is pictures in profile.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Fleur Adcock
The new poems at the end of this volume evidence the power and versatility that FA had reached by now. They include poems about death, dreams, erotic feeling, tiny incidents in her own and others'...
Literary responses Daisy Ashford
J. M. Barrie praised the liveliness of the writing: How incomparably, for instance, the authoress dives into her story at once. How cunningly throughout she keeps us on the hooks of suspense, jumping to Mr...
Friends, Associates Enid Bagnold
With Dolly Tylden , EB occupied a three-bedroom flat and lived in what she recognized as mock poverty.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
31
In Chelsea she socialised with other artists, including Henri Gaudier (who sculpted a bust of...
Publishing Enid Bagnold
While working for Frank Harris on Hearth and Home in 1912-13, EB wrote various dreadful articles (as she later put it)
Bagnold, Enid. Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography (from 1889). Heinemann.
88
including one entitled Young Women Writers: Miss Rosalind Murray and Miss Katherine Mansfield.
Bagnold, Enid. Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography (from 1889). Heinemann.
89
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
The novel was well received. In the AthenæumKatherine Mansfield congratulated EB for creating a pioneer who sees, feels, thinks, hears, and yet is herself full of the sap of life.
Bagnold, Enid, and Laurian Jones. National Velvet. W. Heinemann.
back cover
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
76
Rebecca West
Textual Features Enid Bagnold
Eccentric Mrs St Maugham (owner of the garden on cold and grudging chalk soil, whose poor growing qualities are the play's central symbol) takes on Miss Madrigal as governess to her grand-daughter, Laurel, precisely because...
Intertextuality and Influence Simone de Beauvoir
The second part of her first section, Facts and Myths, draws valuably on analysis of male writers. SB reads Stendhal as decidedly feministic:
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translator Parshley, H. M., Jonathan Cape.
255
he not only values liberty but accepts it as...
Intertextuality and Influence Mathilde Blind
MB 's rendering contributed to making the journal a sensation in England, and a major influence on a generation and more of English journal writers, including Katherine Mansfield . It is, indirectly, the inspiration for...
Reception Elizabeth Bowen
Her short stories have been compared to writings by Katherine Mansfield , Henry James , D. H. Lawrence , and Saki .
Textual Production Dorothy Brett
From about a month after Katherine Mansfield died until the end of the year (with a kind of postscript before leaving for New Mexico), DB kept a surviving diary in a volume given her by...
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
Occupation Dorothy Brett
After graduating from the Slade School of Art, DB became a professional artist. Her most famous early exhibition piece was War Widows, painted in 1916, in which a crowd of black-clad pregnant women take...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Brett
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...
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...

Timeline

1907: Alfred Richard Orage and Holbrook Jackson...

Writing climate item

1907

Alfred Richard Orage and Holbrook Jackson acquired the weekly reviewNew Age (founded in 1894).
Kindley, Evan. “Ismism”. London Review of Books, Vol.
36
, No. 2, 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. 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.

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.

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.

Texts

Mansfield, Katherine. Bliss and Other Stories. Constable, 1920.
Mansfield, Katherine. In a German Pension. Stephen Swift, 1911.
Mansfield, Katherine. Je ne parle pas français. 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. 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.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Editor Murry, John Middleton, Constable and Company, 1928.