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/.
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Lady Ottoline Morrell
Helen Shaw
edited and published a volume of correspondence between LOM
and New Zealand poet D'Arcy Cresswell
. The text also includes Morrell's biographical essay on Katherine Mansfield
.
Morrell, Lady Ottoline, and D’Arcy Cresswell. Dear Lady Ginger. Editor Shaw, Helen, Century Press.
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. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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
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.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
808
Literary responses
Flora Macdonald Mayor
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...
Textual Production
Ngaio Marsh
Having begun as a journalist, NM
often took up opportunities to comment on the world around her in articles or interviews. She spoke on the BBC when she arrived in London after the war about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ngaio Marsh
NM
clearly establishes her sense of the importance of the arts in national life and identity. She vividly evokes the situation of the early settlers in New Zealand as interlopers, white Victorians segregated from...
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...
Friends, Associates
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Her literary friends of a generation before her own included George Meredith
, Rhoda Broughton
, and Henry James
. She participated in the friendship of the two last-named by being regularly at Broughton's house...
Friends, Associates
Ling Shuhua
The group's founders emphasised exchanges between Asian and British literary cultures; they named it after Rabindrath Tagore
's prose-poem collection The Crescent Moon (1903), after they brought Tagore
to Beijing via the Society for Lectures on the New Learning
