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/.
Eccentric Mrs St Maugham (owner of the garden on cold and grudging chalk soil, whose poor growing qualities are the play's central symbol) takes on Miss Madrigal as governess to her grand-daughter, Laurel, precisely because...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Fleur Adcock
She later wrote, Marrying was what we did in those days.
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.
She also told an interviewer that she had seen her husband across a crowded room and snapped him up for his physical beauty. He...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Fleur Adcock
The new poems at the end of this volume evidence the power and versatility that FA
had reached by now. They include poems about death, dreams, erotic feeling, tiny incidents in her own and others'...