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
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.
35
Occupation Virginia Woolf
Once the press was repaired they printed their handbill. Their first book (Two Stories, containing Virginia's The Mark on the Wall and Leonard's Three Jews) had to be set up and printed...
Occupation Virginia Woolf
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Quentin Bell reports that [a]s always, [Woolf] found publication an agitating business, and that when she received her own six copies, on 20 October, she immediately dispatched one to each of Vanessa , Clive Bell
Textual Features Virginia Woolf
Jacob's Room departs sharply from her two earlier novels in both its method and its subject. Leonard Woolf felt on first reading it that Virginia's characters were ghosts or puppets. It is fragmentary, like...
Reception Romer Wilson
RW 's novels, tackling the complex philosophical and social issues that faced people in European countries in the years after the Great War, have been largely, if not entirely, forgotten. Her death at thirty-nine years...
Friends, Associates Anna Wickham
AW frequented popular Bohemian hangouts such as the Café Royal and, later, the Fitzroy Tavern.
Wickham, Anna. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by David Garnett, Chatto and Windus, pp. 7-11.
9-10
Hepburn, James et al. “Anna Wickham: A Memoir”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, pp. 1-48.
26
According to her friend David Garnett , she preferred the hard-up to the well-off, the doomed and...
Publishing Dorothy Whipple
DW must have been writing and publishing stories before her first novel appeared, since she was working on High Wages when her Miss Boddy was printed in Everyman and she recorded it as her first...
Intertextuality and Influence Dorothy Whipple
She drafted the first chapter very soon after receiving her six complementary copies of her first novel; the new working title was Marnie.
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
13, 15
She complained of lack of inspiration, and made a...
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
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth von Arnim
EA also influenced her cousin Katherine Mansfield (then Kathleen Beauchamp). EA 's biographer, Karen Usborne , describes how the young Kathleen frequently reread a copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden that she had received...
Literary responses Elizabeth von Arnim
EA 's readers appreciated the escape from the harsh realities of war that this book provided. Katherine Mansfield , in her review for the Athenæum, found a way to glamorise this aspect of EA
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...
Residence Alison Uttley
She was excited by her first experience of the south, and called Cambridge a city of light.
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph.
65
As a teacher in London, she lived first at 164 Engadine Street in Southfields, south-west London...
Occupation Elizabeth Taylor
ET wrote amusingly of the horror of appearing on a television programme about books, filmed at Birmingham: sitting on spindly chairs under dazzling lights with other participants (Angus Wilson , whom she liked...

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.