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/.
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
Literary responses
Daisy Ashford
J. M. Barrie
praised the liveliness of the writing: How incomparably, for instance, the authoress dives into her story at once. How cunningly throughout she keeps us on the hooks of suspense, jumping to Mr...
Literary responses
Catherine Carswell
According to CC
's son, this was the first time a first novel had won the Melrose Prize. She offered half the prize money of £250 to her friend and literary mentor D. H. Lawrence
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
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...
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
Dorothy Brett
After graduating from the Slade School of Art, DB
became a professional artist. Her most famous early exhibition piece was War Widows, painted in 1916, in which a crowd of black-clad pregnant women take...
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...
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...
