Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand

2018 ◽  
pp. 217-238
Author(s):  
Melissa Edmundson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Katherine Mansfield

‘Not the kind to die’: Katherine Mansfield and the Unquiet Ghost of ‘little brother’

2018 ◽  
pp. 179-196
Author(s):  
J. Lawrence Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Military Training ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Katherine Mansfield

This article documents the longstanding and special bond of affection between Katherine Mansfield and her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp (known as ‘Chummie’ and ‘Bogey’ by family) and the often oblique but artful ways this bond is reflected in her stories. With the aid of War Office records, contemporary New Zealand newspaper reports, and Beauchamp family letters in the Alexander Turnbull Library, the essay specifically addresses hitherto unknown, yet biographically significant, issues concerning Leslie’s education, his social life and military training in England, and his accidental death in Flanders. In so doing, the essay thereby corrects some misapprehensions about Leslie and the nature and extent of Mansfield’s relationship with him.

Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigid Magner
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
Writing Fellows ◽  
New Zealanders

This chapter interrogates the memorialisation of Katherine Mansfield and the complex effects of the Memorial Room at Menton for Mansfield’s legacy and for the New Zealand Writing Fellows who have inhabited it since its establishment in 1969. It argues that New Zealanders ‘have found it difficult to understand her writing and have felt unsure about how to celebrate her memory’ because of her expatriate status. Mansfield’s legacy, then, is ‘often understood to be a burden by subsequent writers’. Taking up the idea of the ‘absent-present’ in literary tourism, Magner argues that the Memorial Room forces Fellows to confront Mansfield’s legacy; yet while they frequently claim that they are affected by their residency, ‘their work does not generally reveal traces of Mansfield, showing that literary influence usually fails to occur where it might be anticipated’.

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Final Letter

Recent scholarship on the complex relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her best-selling author cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield’s largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim’s chiefly one of robust privilege), we know that each of these women experienced the other as an influential presence. Moreover, Mansfield’s narrator in her early collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), bears marked resemblances with the protagonist of Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), and von Arnim’s most radical novel, Vera (1921), was written at the height of her friendship with Mansfield. The final letter Mansfield ever wrote was to von Arnim and, following Mansfield's death in 1923, John Middleton Murry dedicated his posthumous collection of Mansfield’s poems as follows: ‘To Elizabeth of the German Garden who loved certain of these poems and their author’. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars including Bonnie Kime Scott, Angela Smith and Andrew Thacker, including the prize-winning essay by Juliane Römhild and creative contributions from New Zealand writers Sarah Laing and Nina Powles.

scholarly journals ENTREVISTA: Deconstructing Katherine Mansfield: An Interview with Vincent O’Sullivan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Rodríguez Salas
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
E Mail

La presente entrevista1 con Vincent O’Sullivan, uno de los críticos más distinguidos en estudios sobre Katherine Mansfield y escritor reconocido, tuvo lugar en Wellington, Nueva Zealand, durante el verano de 2002, con posteriores modificaciones por e-mail. El editor de The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield discute aspectos centrales en la narrativa de esta autora, tales como su alcance literario, su relación con el relato corto, su ambigüedad sexual, el distanciamiento entre ella como autora y los personajes que crea, su peculiar modernismo distinto del canónico masculino, el papel de los niños y la autobiografía en su narrativa y sus principales logros y defectos como escritora. El resultado es una imagen subversiva de Mansfield que contrasta con el mito purificador cuidadosamente elaborado por su esposo John Middleton Murry tras la muerte de Mansfield en 1923.Abstract: Held in Wellington, New Zealand, during the summer of 2002 and subsequently upgraded via email, this is an interview with one of the most reputable scholars in Katherine Mansfield studies, Prof. Vincent O’Sullivan, a prolific and respectable writer himself. The editor of Mansfield’s Collected Letters discusses key issues in Mansfield’s fiction, such as her literary status, her connection with the short story genre, her sexual ambiguity, the breach between herself and the fictional characters that she creates, her distinctive modernism as detached from the male canon, the role of children and autobiography in her narrative, and her main achievements and flaws as a writer. The result is a subversive image of Mansfield, opposed to the purifying myth craftily designed by her husband John Middleton Murry after her death in 1923.

‘The only truth I really care about.’ Katherine Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute: A Biographical Reflection

2017 ◽  
pp. 125-150
Author(s):  
Pierce Butler
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
The West ◽  
Harmonious Development

The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield spent the last three months of her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, an esoteric school occupying a magnificent chateau in the woods of Fontainebleau and directed by G. I. Gurdjieff, a mystic of Greek and Armenian heritage who had brought an eclectic teaching compounded of Sufism and Christian esotericism to the West. She was dying of tuberculosis, and she had despaired of a cure. Nevertheless she wished to make use of the time that remained to her in order to acknowledge her personal shortcomings and to settle her accounts with family and friends. She perceived in Gurdjieff’s teaching the possibility of attaining an inner freedom that had eluded her throughout her life. Despite the reservations of her husband and literary friends, Mansfield was able to use the opportunities for insight and transformation created by Gurdjieff to formulate a new ideal for her writing – and to transform her suffering into hope, faith, and love.

After Life – Expressions of Mourning in Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Juliane Römhild
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Great War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

Like many women, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim lost members of their immediate family in the Great War, and both writers worked through their loss in writing. Although their work is stylistically and thematically different, the expressions of grief in their work shares certain characteristics with other (post-)war writing. This article examines the literary responses to personal to loss in von Arnim’s novels Christine and In the Mountains, as well as Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and “The Fly” with the help of their private diaries and letters.

New Zealand Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Sword
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
American Poet ◽  
New Zealand Robin ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Formative Years ◽  
European Modernism

The moniker "New Zealand Modernism" is most frequently used today to describe art and architecture produced in New Zealand from the 1930s through the 1960s and beyond: for example, the paintings of Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, Gordon Walters, and Frances Hodgkins and the architecture of Ernst Plischke, Bill Toomath, Miles Warren, Maurice Mahoney, Humphrey Hall, and the Group architects. In literary studies, by contrast, the only New Zealand authors consistently labelled "modernists" are those who left home to anchor themselves in intellectual currents abroad: Katherine Mansfield, who wrote most of her New Zealand-themed stories from self-imposed exile in England and France; Lola Ridge, who represented herself in later life as an Australian-American poet despite, having spent 23 formative years in New Zealand; Robin Hyde, whose longing to see a wider world took her to war-torn China in the late 1930s. Yet, New Zealand literature from the 1920s onward was deeply influenced by Anglo-European modernism, often in ways that belie its seemingly provincial character and realist bias.

Katherine Mansfield in New Zealand

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 147-149
Author(s):  
Felicity Sheehy
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Katherine Mansfield
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