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/.
At a party given by Dorothy Brett
at her Hampstead studio, DC
met and began a friendship with Katherine Mansfield
.
Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. Alfred Knopf.
139-40
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf
, Hugh Walpole
accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
Textual Production
Dorothy Brett
From about a month after Katherine Mansfield
died until the end of the year (with a kind of postscript before leaving for New Mexico), DB
kept a surviving diary in a volume given her by...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Brett
DB
's younger sister, Sylvia, later Lady Brooke
, born in 1885, is herself of no minor literary significance. She authored numerous works including two autobiographies, romance novels, and short stories, and claimed J. M. Barrie
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...
Friends, Associates
Dorothy Brett
The relationship between DB
and Katherine Mansfield
appears to have been one of mutual support, each engaging deeply with the other's work. Brett credits Mansfield with the beginning of her artistic career, She gave me...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Brett
As well as sharing a house in Hampstead for some time with her close and loyal friend Mansfield
, DB
lived for a while with Mark Gertler
as her lodger (who, however, was not her...
Brett, Dorothy. Lawrence and Brett. J. B. Lippincott Company.
39-40
On the whole, however, she did not pursue literary friendships in the USA. She continued her...
Publishing
Dorothy Brett
The New Yorker in the event paid $410, of which an agent claimed ten percent and Crichton claimed a third. Brett did make another thirty-five dollars when the piece was reprinted in a volume. Her...
MB
's rendering contributed to making the journal a sensation in England, and a major influence on a generation and more of English journal writers, including Katherine Mansfield
. It is, indirectly, the inspiration for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Simone de Beauvoir
The second part of her first section, Facts and Myths, draws valuably on analysis of male writers. SB
reads Stendhal
as decidedly feministic:
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translator Parshley, H. M., Jonathan Cape.
255
he not only values liberty but accepts it as...
Friends, Associates
Enid Bagnold
With Dolly Tylden
, EB
occupied a three-bedroom flat and lived in what she recognized as mock poverty.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
31
In Chelsea she socialised with other artists, including Henri Gaudier
(who sculpted a bust of...
Publishing
Enid Bagnold
While working for Frank Harris
on Hearth and Home in 1912-13, EB
wrote various dreadful articles (as she later put it)
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.
