Katherine Mansfield in a Global Context

Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (eds), Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 280 pp., £72. ISBN 978 90 04 28368 8 Kirsty Gunn, My Katherine Mansfield Project (Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2015), 148 pp., £14.99. ISBN 978 1 910749 04 3 Andrew Harrison, ...

The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

This article examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

At Home Among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield

The purpose of this article is to incorporate the little-studied writer, Olive Garnett, into the discussion surrounding Katherine Mansfield in relation to Russian themes. Both Mansfield and Garnett had a common interest in Russia and, writing in the same literary milieu, both wrote short stories about Russia and Russians. Where the interest in Russia comes from for Garnett and Mansfield forms a substantial part of this article. Both were influenced by various Russian radicals and philosophers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky who conceivably served to inspire the writing of both women. The context will stem from the ‘Russomania’ that took hold from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the subsequent fin-de-siècle and post-Great War paranoias within the British national consciousness which expressed itself in the form of prejudice towards the foreign Other. It will consider the influence Russia, and Russian people, had on the style and work of Mansfield and Garnett, and in turn reveal how both writers present Russia.

‘A child of the sun’: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff

Less than two years after KM’s arrival in London in 1908 to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, the enormous Japanese exhibition was held at in London from May to October 1910. It was a concerted and systematic attempt by Japan to explain its traditional society and arts, modern industry and empire to Great Britain, and over 8 million visitors attended. Mansfield took to wearing a kimono at home, read the poems of Yone Noguchi, and Okakura’s The Book of Tea, and talked about visiting Japan. There were Japanese allusions in both her fiction and her personal writing for the rest of her life. In addition, in 1922, Mansfield’s life was transformed by a book entitled Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego, whose Eastern mystic philosophy she wholeheartedly embraced, and which drove her to seek a spiritual cure for her diseased body, since physical cures had proved worthless. The final three months of her life were spent at Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau, immersed in eastern esoteric teaching.

‘Je ne parle pas français’: Reading Mansfield’s Underground Man

Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas francais”, a story about unrequited desire and its effects, is narrated by its principal character. He is an unscrupulous, unsavoury type, which has helped make Mansfield’s critics quasi-unanimous in condemning him for his role in the events portrayed and questioning the way he describes them. His bitterness and scepticism have reminded some of Mansfield’s readers of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”. The proto-existentialist aspect of the stories, their preoccupation with “good faith”, their scepticism concerning belief systems and grand abstractions more generally, the difficulties of escaping various kinds of isolation, the difficulties of sustained emotional commitment, all these help make the case for reading the stories in conjunction. Mansfield use a number of strategies – literary allusions, thematic echoes, self-reflexiveness –to help readers negotiate the story’s complexities. In the end, the large questions may remain unanswered, but that is as may be. “Je ne parle pas francais” firmly establishes her as an important modernist writer and a valuable link with Dostoevsky and the great Russian forebears in whom she took such an interest.

Introduction

With all due respect to France, it is safe to say that, after New Zealand and England, Russia became by far the most important country in Katherine Mansfield’s evolution as a writer. The powerful fascination with Russian literature and culture was largely shared by Mansfield’s entire generation at the time. As Donald Davie astutely pointed out in ...

Near Misses: From Gerhardi to Mansfield (and back), via Anton Chekhov

This essay explores the rich epistolary exchange between Katherine Mansfield and William Gerhardi, when she was at the height of her career and he was a student and aspiring novelist. It traces the essential intermediary presence of Chekhov in their letters, in terms of his biography, writerly ethics and characteristic voice. A mutual love of Chekhov provides the key to the writers’ fast-developing intimacy, as they model their own lives, literary aspirations and style around his. As the essay suggests, their persistent failure to meet, the thwarted projects they cherish, and the hapless personas they perform – in themselves Chekhovian trademarks – are later reconfigured in Gerhardi’s own fictional worlds and literary criticism, to the extent that his first two novels, ostensibly about the Russian Revolution and the immediately post-revolutionary era in Russia, as well as his essay on Chekhov, can themselves be read as a loving tribute to the first mentors, and the wistful pleasures of never quite meeting them.

A Note on Some Unidentified Sources in Mansfield’s Reading from 1907

This article examines a number of unattributed quotations taken from Katherine Mansfield’s journals of 1907, documenting her previously unknown reading of the works of three popular Edwardian novelists: Anthony Hope Hawkins, Henry Seton Merriman and Horace Annesley Vachell.

Creative Non-Fiction

Close readers of Katherine Mansfield will recall her bold decision in the autumn of 1922 to become a resident at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, founded by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (?1866–1949), not far from Paris, just weeks before her death. Mansfield could have some confidence in the adventure: she would share it with A. R. Orage, her trusted mentor, who had set aside his prominent literary and journalistic career in London to also join Gurdjieff and his circle. The new home of the Institute was Le Prieuré des Basses Loges, a manor house at Fontainebleau-Avon, adjoining the storied forest where kings had hunted. Gurdjieff was – and has remained – a controversial figure, deeply appreciated by some, maligned by others. We should content ourselves here with Mansfield’s vision of the man as a wise, multi-talented and kind teacher, willing to number her among the Institute’s participants despite the fact that he knew her to be mortally ill. She had come to remake her life: if not her health – though there is always hope – then her inner life, her sense of herself. ‘At 34 I am beginning my education,’ she wrote with conviction after some weeks at the Prieuré. It did not take long for her to know that she belonged, frail as she was. How touching to hear her write about ‘the new theatre that we are building. I must go.’...

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

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.