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

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.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’

NOTE: The spoken words, quotation marks and parentheses all come from Woolf’s 1928 text (CSF, pp. 215–20). I thank the Society of Authors, executor for the Literary Estate of Virginia Woolf, for permission to reproduce copyright material. Formal permission must be obtained from the Society of Authors for any performance of this play....

Talk

This transcript of a talk given by Ali Smith at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 23 October 2014 is published here for the first time. A recording of the talk may be heard at https://soundcloud.com/npglondon/getting-virginia-woolfs-goat-a-lecture-by-ali-smith ‘Well it is five minutes to ten: but where am I, writing with pen & ink? Not in my studio.’ No, unusually, in this diary entry from May 1932, Woolf is miles from home and miles from England, a foreigner on holiday in Greece, sitting in a dip of land ‘at Delphi, under an olive tree […] on dry earth covered with white daisies’. Leonard is next to her. His holiday reading is a Greek grammar. She sees a butterfly go past. ‘I think, a swallow tail.’ It’s all part of the desire to catalogue where we are. She describes simply for her diary what’s around her: the bushes and rocks and trees, the ‘huge bald gray & black mountain’, the earth, the flies, the flowers, the sound of goat bells....

‘Roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife’: Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield

Inspired by the interdisciplinary studies undertaken by Michael North and Rochelle Rives, this article examines conspicuous representations of the modern female face in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Pictures’ (1920), and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). If writers and artists of the early twentieth century dispelled facile assumptions about a mimetic relationship between face and character, why are two modernist women writers so invested in highlighting the female face? I approach this query and the lexical visages Mansfield and Woolf craft by situating their work within a cultural-historical framework that constellates nineteenth-century physiognomy, a growing female presence in the public sphere, and the rise of modern visual technologies. Physiognomy had lost its cultural traction by the fin de siècle, but it left an indelible influence on cultural assumptions about women who crossed domestic thresholds. I demonstrate that Woolf and Mansfield convey a salient interest in the inscrutable female visage that resists being read as what Rives calls a ‘text for analysis and interpretation’. Both writers reveal concerns about the modern woman’s visual identification, but of the two, it is Mansfield who fashions corrective images and extricates the modern woman from her physiognomic past.

Katherine’s Secrets

When Mansfield offered Woolf ‘scrupulously truthful’ friendship – ‘the freedom of the city without any reserves at all’ – Woolf had already playfully described her as ‘utterly unscrupulous’. Attacking ‘the same job’ of creating a new postwar aesthetics, they shared ‘priceless talk’ about their ‘precious art’ even as their friendship foundered in distance, absence, ‘quicksands’ of insincerity, misunderstandings, secrets, silences – reserves of all sorts. This essay considers this competitive, irreplaceable literary friendship through the veil of Katherine’s secrets, things we see that Virginia evidently couldn’t, or could see only after Mansfield’s death: Mansfield’s 1919 letters about Night and Day; her ‘doubtful’ unsigned 1920 review of it, ‘A Tragic Comedienne’; her 1915 war story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, unpublished until after her death, and its resonances with Colette’s war journalism; the open secrets of her posthumously published Doves’ Nest and Journal, which flow into Woolf’s creation of The Waves. Whether Mansfield’s mercurial ‘we’ voices their ‘public of two’, her exclusive alliance with Murry against Bloomsbury, or their postwar generation’s ‘change of heart’, her work, talk, and thought participate in – and even inspire – that ‘thinking in common’ Woolf theorises in A Room of One’s Own and abstracts as ‘the life of anybody’ in The Waves.

‘Which of my many […] hundreds of selves?’ Extending Mansfield’s Posthumous Literary Reception

Pierce Butler, A Child of the Sun (Mount Desert: Beech Hill, 2016), 184 pp., £11.50. ISBN 9780990820086 Sandra Jobson, ‘Introduction’, in D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Svengali Press, 2016), 496 pp., £22.30. ISBN 9781925416473 Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years...

Poetry

Forbidden to touch her hair, he touches it. Or does he? In God’s truth I tell you, the back of my hand brushed her soft brown curls. ‘“Mine beyond words”’. Earnest onlookers may lean over cases coveting her keepsakes. ‘I have had my thrill for the night....

Powers of Disgust: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Woolf and Mansfield are often noted for their lyricism, but they also share a powerful undercurrent of disgust. This essay considers how recent theories of disgust pertain to their writing, especially to Mansfield’s In a German Pension and Woolf’s The Years. It concludes with a comparison of two short stories, Woolf’s “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938) and Mansfield’s ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which have aroused disgusted reactions in their readers.

Play

Play, adaptation of Virginia Woolf's ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’

Seated between ‘Geniuses’: Conrad Aiken’s Imaginative and Critical Responses to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

The writing of the American poet, fiction writer and critic, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) significantly affected the critical receptions of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. His personal encounters with them during his time of involvement in the production of the Athenaeum is reflected not only in his incisive reviews of their fiction, but in his own creative writing as well. His short stories and experimental memoir, Ushant, (1963) reveal the two women's differing forms of influence upon him. In his memoir, he portrays the relations between Woolf and Mansfield as representative of the ‘merciless warfare’ that prevailed in the London literary world in 1920. If his creative legacy from Woolf was stylistic and psychological, from Mansfield it was inspirational. He was in love with the spontaneity and life-enhancing vitality of her prose, her ‘genius’ for making her characters ‘real.’ The sense of an intuitive connection between himself and Mansfield underpins his imaginative efforts to recreate his encounters with her, as is exemplified most powerfully in his short story: ‘Your Obituary, Well Written,’ (1928) in which he creates a thinly veiled portrait of characters uncannily similar to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry.