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 each book in this series relates to one of Shakespeare
's plays, this one relates to Pericles, and the artist that it relates to is Tacita Dean, who is famous for her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
With her background in academia and her work reviewing fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian, AS
has produced an impressive amount of literary criticism. She has written critical introductions for reissues of work...
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...
Residence
Alison Uttley
She was excited by her first experience of the south, and called Cambridge a city of light.
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph.
65
As a teacher in London, she lived first at 164 Engadine Street in Southfields, south-west London...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
made contact with Katherine Mansfield
after discovering through Frank Swinnerton
that Mansfield was a New Zealand cousin, formerly named Kathleen Beauchamp. A friendship ensued.
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head.
217
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
also influenced her cousin Katherine Mansfield
(then Kathleen Beauchamp). EA
's biographer, Karen Usborne
, describes how the young Kathleen frequently reread a copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden that she had received...
Literary responses
Elizabeth von Arnim
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
Fictionalization
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
inspired a number of creative portraits by her contemporaries during the earlier part of her career. Probably the best-known is the character of Mrs Failing in E. M. Forster
's novel The Longest Journey...
Publishing
Dorothy Whipple
DW
must have been writing and publishing stories before her first novel appeared, since she was working on High Wages when her Miss Boddy was printed in Everyman and she recorded it as her first...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Whipple
She drafted the first chapter very soon after receiving her six complementary copies of her first novel; the new working title was Marnie.
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
13, 15
She complained of lack of inspiration, and made a...
Friends, Associates
Anna Wickham
AW
frequented popular Bohemian hangouts such as the Café Royal and, later, the Fitzroy Tavern.
Wickham, Anna. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by David Garnett, Chatto and Windus, pp. 7-11.
9-10
Hepburn, James et al. “Anna Wickham: A Memoir”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, pp. 1-48.
26
According to her friend David Garnett
, she preferred the hard-up to the well-off, the doomed and...
Reception
Romer Wilson
RW
's novels, tackling the complex philosophical and social issues that faced people in European countries in the years after the Great War, have been largely, if not entirely, forgotten. Her death at thirty-nine years...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
and Katherine Mansfield
first met; before this Woolf had asked Lytton Strachey
to arrange a meeting between them.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
