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/.
Speedie, Julie. Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson. Virago.
239-40
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...
Textual Production
Ling Shuhua
These included Once Upon a Time, about the lesbian desire between two students at a girls' boarding school; the politically-oriented story Waiting, inspired by fatalities during student protests; and a translation of Katherine Mansfield
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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
Dedications
Susan Miles
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.
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.
