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/.
Other reviews of the book, which appeared immediately after its publication, were not altogether positive. Katherine Mansfield
, in the Athenæum, commented that even while DR
's talent for reproducing the minute details of...
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.
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
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...
Literary responses
E. B. C. Jones
Mansfield
further praised its distinction of style. Rebecca West
found in it a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching. Her slightly acerbic account of characters and their milieu—the tone of...
Helen Byatt
traces the quests of The Hearing Trumpet to texts the author encountered as a child, including the pre-Christian fairy tales and Celtic narratives shared by her nanny and maternal relatives along with Robert Graves
Literary responses
Mary Lavin
This volume brought ML
critical acclaim. R. J. Thompson
read it as establishing her position as one of the most artful and perceptive masters of the story form in our day.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
In Ireland, wrote the...
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
Given both the nature of the central event—a ball—and Olivia's youthful enthusiasm, the novel has been compared to Katherine Mansfield
's short story Her First Ball. It was an immediate success with the reviewers...
Literary Setting
Kate Clanchy
Some stories concern painful and intractible moral and emotional dilemmas as they present themselves in ordinary life, like the inner defences automatically in place against believing that one's father has Alzheimer's. Several explore the relationship...
Occupation
Barbara Pym
This work gave her considerable free time, most of which she spent reading such authors as Austen
, Johnson
, Scott
, and Trollope
. She particularly admired the forms of Mansfield
's published scrapbook...
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...
