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/.
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ada Leverson
Edith Ottley is now a reader of Katherine Mansfield
's and John Middleton Murry
's Rhythm.
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne.
51
Though her husband is as unsatisfactory as before, she has gained stature, dignity, and moral self-confidence, though...
Intertextuality and Influence
Tillie Olsen
By the time she entered high school she was keeping a journal in assorted and undated notebooks containing poems, bits of stories, drafts of letters, and reflections.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
37
One year into high school she began...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ling Shuhua
LS and Zhimo continued to work together and he championed her work: he called her, approvingly, the Chinese Katherine Mansfield because of her style and her emphasis on the inner lives of women and girls...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Constance Garnett
On reading these translations, Katherine Mansfield
wrote to CG
: As I laid down my copy of War and Peace tonight I knew I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rumer Godden
As a very young woman RC discovered Katherine Mansfield
's journals and found them a revelation and a springboard.
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.
Her own life-writing, however, is less immediate, more worked on. It is often very close to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Richardson
Susan Miles
satirized DR
's and Katherine Mansfield
's writing in Two Novelists, a piece published in the London Mercury.
Richardson, Dorothy. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Editor Fromm, Gloria G., University of Georgia Press.
EF
seems never to have read the modernist male poets, Eliot or Pound or Auden; however, she did read and appreciate such women as Rosamond Lehmann
, Storm Jameson
, Katherine Mansfield
, and Virginia Woolf
.
Farjeon, Annabel. Morning has Broken: A Biography of Eleanor Farjeon. Julia MacRae.
181
Leisure and Society
Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO
described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Some of Richardson's readers considered that she, like Joyce
, focused more than necessary on the seamier details of life. Reviewers were not altogether impressed by this novel. Reviewing Richardson again in the Athenæum in...
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.
Rediscovery of FMM
was fostered by Sybil Oldfield
, who in 1984 published an extensive account of Mayor's life and works (which she narrated in parallel with those of Mayor's contemporary Mary Sheepshanks
). During...
