Why do you push away just that which you need —because of convention? She affects her readers in a similar way. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his nature, his natural desires? Katherine Mansfield with her sister Jeanne and her brother Leslie.

These frequent separations from her husband allowed one aspect of her writing to flourish—letters. Please visit for all your employment screening needs. The Poems of Katherine Mansfield, OUP.

- Bowden, a singing teacher, leaving him the day after the wedding.

Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire. If she was never a saint, she was certainly a martyr, and a heroine in her recklessness, her dedication and her courage. Our often grudging admiration perhaps has the cast of a distinctively local attitude to high artistic achievement. Yet Katherine Mansfield was always divisive, wherever she was received. The impression she left on those who knew her was strong and ambiguous. She affects her readers in a similar way. After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life, felt but not quite grasped. A New Zealand of the Mind Unfinished business lies at the heart of the Mansfield life story, not least because she died young—in 1923 at the age of thirty four, the author of just three books of short stories a fourth and fifth would appear after her death. Her own feeling, as she was dying of tuberculosis, was that she had only just started as a writer. Katherine Mansfield with her sister Jeanne and her brother Leslie. Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image. Mansfield left for London in 1908 aged 20, never to return to New Zealand. In the context of a long and arduous sea journey — six or seven weeks—this might not appear significant. Later in her life, of course, Mansfield was frequently incapacitated by illness. Even allowing for this, it is obvious that she saw no point in a return voyage to her birthplace—and that has had an effect on how we, as New Zealanders, see her. Irrationally, we feel abandoned. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. And so our sense of abandonment is corrected slightly by a feeling of pride. Where did that revolution start? Wellington in the 1880s, showing the Beauchamp house. Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image. Imaginative Truths Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington in 1888. The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of a great many girls. It rather made me smile to read of your wishing you could create your fate — O how many times I have felt just the same. I just long for power over circumstances. The headmistress was on to something. Of course what Mansfield was looking for were imaginative truths. She had begun to write stories and poems. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his nature, his natural desires? No, that is how he is so great. Why do you push away just that which you need —because of convention? Why do you dwarf your nature, spoil your life? You are blind, and far worse, you are deaf to all that is worth living for. Here it is all baldly stated. In her most persuasive work, Mansfield would find a way of pressing the threads of such a credo into the weave of her fiction. The Bogey of Love In 1908, Mansfield finally persuaded her father to let her go back to London, ostensibly to continue with her music studies. When the affair collapsed, she impulsively married G. Bowden, a singing teacher, leaving him the day after the wedding. She resumed her relationship with Garnet, became pregnant, and eventually had a stillborn child. Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image. Her devotion was unwavering in the face of some extraordinary insults and unkindnesses. I take advantage of you—demand perfection of you—crush you. She began to publish sharply comic stories in a small weekly arts paper, the New Age, and in 1919 her first book came out. In a German Pension showed Mansfield on the offensive. The Germans are fanatically humourless, routinely condescending, and always eating. Learning to be Brutal In 1912 she met and quickly married John Middleton Murry, an Oxford undergraduate and already the founding editor of a small literary journal with a modernist agenda, Rhythm. The paintings of Colin McCahon, and the films of Jane Campion, Peter Jackson and Vincent Ward, for instance, are often soaked in this atmosphere of foreboding, depicting landscapes animated with an indefinable malice. Rhythm folded in 1913, to be replaced by a new venture, the short-lived Blue Review, jointly edited by Murry and Mansfield. The material insecurity of their lives, mixed with the volatility of their own natures, initiated a lifelong pattern of partings and reconciliations. The old certainties of religious faith, sexual propriety and social stability seemed less authoritative, just as the artistic means of representing these aspects of society were changing. While the break is not so complete nor the timing quite so neat—there were movements across society and the arts prior to World War I which contributed to these changes—the War shook the European sensibility completely. Leslie Beauchamp in uniform, 1915 Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image. Eliot, in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and D. The artistic responses were different in each writer but the mood of overthrow linked them all. Joyce in Ulysses traced an elaborate and ironic Homeric myth over a single Dublin day and presented the novel with a fresh task: to map the mind and its wanderings. These two took the high ground, writing works that required professorial assistance to unpick their densely patterned structures. The number of things that are really phallic from fountain pen fillers onwards! Yet Mansfield had something beyond literary technique or cultured despair to drawn on. She had New Zealand. If estrangement was the oxygen of modernism, Mansfield, the colonial, had lungs that were filled as a birthright. Increasingly Mansfield would come to see this as a bounty to the artist rather than a burden, and to coax from its freedoms—the freedom from a literary tradition but also social and cultural freedoms as well as the freedoms of a sparsely populated landscape—her own freedom as a writer. Of course writers were not the only ones thinking about newness. The radical spirit in the visual arts was also crucial here. The scenes corresponded rather with interior images of the landscape that were constantly shifting with the light, with the movement of trees and sky; the paintings owed allegiance finally to the emotional response of the artist rather than to the ideal of a realistically rendered object. It was the thing as it was experienced rather than as it might photographically appear. The world was shown to be not fixed or static but elusive, fleeting, indefinite. It was up for grabs. Again, in the context of the war-time experience, when society had failed to supply its citizens with security and authority, the idea of the supremacy of individual consciousness had obvious merit. If the exterior world was full of lies and false promises and death, the interior could be the place of authenticity. The Dark-Eyed Tramp Mansfield had always been concerned with notions of authenticity. There is something of this in the playful nicknames she gave out and took on. In 1910, after attending a Japanese cultural exhibition, she took to wearing a pink kimono. Katherine Mansfield in Arabian shawl Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image. This experimentation was a game; it was also in earnest, the classic moves of the outsider seeking to define a self in the new setting at the same time as she wished to escape definition. England is of no use to me. I would not care if I never saw the English country again. The action involves the Burnell family moving house from the town to the nearby countryside. The story is told in twelve sections. We enter an individual consciousness for a few pages at a time before moving on to someone else. We glide from adults to children and back again, and from the family to its servants. The story is a miracle of fluidity. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops. I tried to catch that moment. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again. Its insights were not arrived at through the observations of an outsider but mediated magically, it seems, through a floating narrator with access to the interior dramas of each personality. The intimacy was startling. These frequent separations from her husband allowed one aspect of her writing to flourish—letters. And taken with her journals, the correspondence now has a literary reputation to rival the fiction. In September 1920, Mansfield moved to the Riviera town of Menton, renting the Villa Isola Bella, and entering one of her most productive periods. A few months later there was another move—this time to a mountainside chalet in Switzerland. Again, the New Zealand material proved most fertile for exploring issues of identity, belonging, and desire. These magazine stories ran alongside more experimental pieces, making it difficult to assess her avant-garde ambitions. Reviewers tended to see it as a strong collection rather than a radical work. In 1922 Mansfield should have been secure, buoyant. In fact, her health was getting worse and she was now looking for a miracle cure. Disillusioned with conventional medical practice, Mansfield entered the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau in France. His commune was an attempt to restore balance through a regime that included physical exercise and labour. Residents were encouraged to walk about with arms outstretched for long periods, take part in dances, and rise early in the morning to do communal work. None of this, of course, would have been an ideal regime for a TB sufferer. Immediately, we see the appeal of this for Mansfield, whose work is filled with ambivalence about a permanent, fixed identity, and gestures always towards something more fluid and flexible and organic. Her life was new, her manners and dress were new, her art was new. Her literary afterlife began quite soon. In 1927, he edited the Journal of Katherine Mansfield and a selection of letters appeared the following year. The contemporary Mansfield is a figure of vivid contradiction—fiercely independent and pathetically needy, brilliantly bold and wretchedly repentant, terrifically ambitious and plagued by self-doubt. And these contradictions are most vitally present in all her thinking and writing about home, New Zealand. The despised place could also be the dream place. The empty place could be imaginatively rich. The unschooled land could teach the world. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was the beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall. References Alpers, Anthony 1980. The Life of Katherine Mansfield, Viking. Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer, Penguin. The Life of John Middleton Murry, Methuen. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Penguin. The Poems of Katherine Mansfield, OUP. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols, Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates Ltd. Katherine Mansfield: Letters and Journals, Penguin. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, Penguin. I think you've written an outstanding and far reaching overview of her life. I've become dazzled by her writing and it's wonderful to know more about the artist and her development. I'll certainly be looking to find all of her writing and proudly add them to my library. I am currently taking a BEd degree at University of Hertfordshire and have been given an assignment to do which I am researching. It is The Voyage and I would love to get a more deeper understanding of what she was trying to say about herself through this story. Please could you send me information on The Voyage. You have given me a great perspective of her work and life through this website. I am most definitely going to read more of her stories. Many thanks, Mrs J Slome. Katherine Mansfield was one of my favourite authors when I was a college student. I really did a lot research then and photocopied as many materials on this author as possible. Before I set down pen to write my thesis, I went to Beijing, Shanghai and Hanjing, visiting major libraries and universities in order to get as much information as I could. As your site says, there have been a lot of literary studies in China in the last century, maybe more than anywhere else, I guess. Thank you again for the work you have done here. Here, in Brazil, Katherine Mansfield has a lot of readers who like her novels. A great Brazilian poet, Vinicius de Moraes, wrote a poem to her. I'm sending it to you in Portuguese and English. If you like, put it in her page. SONETO A KATHERINE MANSFIELD O teu perfume, amada - em tuas cartas Renasce, azul... Relembro-as brancas, leves, fenecidas Pendendo ao longo de corolas fartas. Relembro-as, vou - nas terras percorridas Torno a aspirá-lo, aqui e ali desperto Paro - e tão perto sinto-te, tão perto Como se numa foram duas vidas. Pranto, tão pouca dor! Nunca te apartas Primavera, dos sonhos e das preces! E no perfume preso em tuas cartas À primavera surges e esvaneces. Vinicius de Moraes SONNET TO KATHERINE MANSFIELD Your perfume, beloved - in your letters Reborn, blue... I remember them white, light, withered Pending along abundante corollas. I remember them, I go - in lands gone through I inhale it again, here and there awakened I stop - and so close I feel you, so close As if in one we had two lives. Weeping, so little pain! And in the imprisoned perfume in your letters To the spring appears and evanesces. Translation: Regina Werneck Regards, Arnaldo Nogueira Junior. It is brilliant and totally right for nzedge. I knew of her but not about her. Now I can add it to my great New Zealanders list. Yet even more enjoyable is the way that the importance of New Zealand is woven into her story. When I read that Mansfield left these shores at 20 I thought we had another Russell Crowe on our hands no disrespect to Maximus but fighting over whether he is Kiwi or Aussie seems a bit grasping to me. Damien showed that New Zealand and the Edge suffused the work and life of an incredible women. Edge is an attitude and what unites us wherever we ply our trade. Thank you, and your team, for another great installment and reminder why we our so lucky.

Her life was new, her manners and dress were new, her art was new. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the si and nostalgia of the expatriate. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of katherine moraes nature, his natural desires. It is brilliant and totally right for nzedge. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the sincere blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops. We enter an individual consciousness for a few pages at a time before moving on to someone else. Our often grudging admiration perhaps has katherine moraes cast of a too local attitude to high artistic achievement. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Penguin.