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/.
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
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elaine Feinstein
Feinstein follows Lawrence from his early aspiration to be a spokesman for women to his later mounting rage against women's desires to use their minds and express their individuality.
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
Textual Production
Margiad Evans
Among other writers of stories, she admired not Virginia Woolf
or Katherine Mansfield
, but the greater power and fury of Eudora Welty
,
Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, and Margiad Evans. “Introduction”. The Old and the Young, Seren, pp. 7-17.
15
as well as several male Welsh writers in English, and...
Textual Production
Helen Dunmore
HD
's many other writings include reviews (of both poetry and fiction), introductions (to the poems of Emily Brontë
, the stories of D. H. Lawrence
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
, and a study of...
Sewell Stokes
, in a brief portrait of VC
in 1928, described her as one who had at one time been accused of poisoning the purity of British homes with her sordid writings ....
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...
WC
issued a volume of essays entitled Not Under Forty, which includes analysis of the writing of Sarah Orne Jewett
and Katherine Mansfield
.
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.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Willa Cather
To one of the essays here, The Novel Démeublé, belongs WC
's famous insistence that selection of detail is what matters in art and literature, that too much detail is mere cataloguing. Her essay...
Textual Features
Angela Carter
It includes work by Katherine Mansfield
, Leonora Carrington
, Elizabeth Jolley
, Jamaica Kincaid
, and Carter herself. She carefully avoided identifying bad girls with sexual profligates, but looked for a certain cussedness, a bloodymindedness..
Laws-Wall, Lydia. “One of a kind”. Mslexia, No. 48, p. 53.
53
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
Leonora Carrington
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