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/.
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...
Textual Production
Helen Dunmore
HD
's many other writings include reviews (of both poetry and fiction), introductions (to the poems of Emily Brontë
, the stories of D. H. Lawrence
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
, and a study of...
Textual Features
Shena Mackay
The stories here deal with all kinds of complexity and nuance in the sisterly relationship. The collection ends, as the introduction begins, with Christina Rossetti
's Goblin Market. The nineteenth century is further represented...
Textual Features
Angela Carter
It includes work by Katherine Mansfield
, Leonora Carrington
, Elizabeth Jolley
, Jamaica Kincaid
, and Carter herself. She carefully avoided identifying bad girls with sexual profligates, but looked for a certain cussedness, a bloodymindedness..
Laws-Wall, Lydia. “One of a kind”. Mslexia, No. 48, p. 53.
53
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...
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...
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...
Reception
Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively
wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf
, Hugh Walpole
accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
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...
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...
Publishing
Dorothy Brett
The New Yorker in the event paid $410, of which an agent claimed ten percent and Crichton claimed a third. Brett did make another thirty-five dollars when the piece was reprinted in a volume. Her...
