MANSFIELD, Katherine

Pseudonym for Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Wellington, 14 October 1888. Education: A school in Karori; Girls' High School, Wellington, 1898-99; Miss Swainson's School, Wellington, 1900-03; Queen's College, London, 1903-06; Wellington Technical College, 1908. Family: Married 1) George Bowden in 1909 (separated 1909; divorced 1918); 2) the writer and editor John Middleton Murry in 1918 (lived with him from 1912). Career: Settled in London, 1908; contributed to the New Age, 1910-11; contributed to Murry's Rhythm and its successor, the Blue Review, and became partner in the business, 1911-13; reviewer, Westminster Gazette, 1911-15; founder, with Murry and D. H. Lawrence, q.v., Signature magazine, 1916; afflicted with tuberculosis: lived for part of each year in the south of France and Switzerland, from 1916; contributed to the Athenaeum, edited by Murry, 1919-20. Died: 9 January 1923.

Publications

Collections

Collected Stories. 1945.

Selected Stories, edited by Dan Davin. 1953.

The Stories, edited by Anthony Alpers. 1984.

Works (Centenary Edition), edited by Cherry Hankin. 1988—.

Katherine Mansfield. 1994.

Short Stories

In a German Pension. 1911.

Je ne parle pas français. 1918.

Bliss and Other Stories. 1920.

The Garden Party and Other Stories. 1922.

The Dove's Nest and Other Stories. 1923.

Something Childish and Other Stories. 1924; as The Little Girl and Other Stories, 1924.

The Aloe. 1930; edited by Vincent O'Sullivan, 1982.

Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories, edited by Ian A. Gordon. 1974.

The Escape and Other Stories. 1995.

Seven Short Stories. 1996.

Katherine Mansfield: A "Do You Remember" Life: Four Stories. 1996.

Poetry

Poems. 1923; edited by Vincent O'Sullivan, 1990.

Other

Journal, edited by J. Middleton Murry. 1927; revised edition, 1954.

Letters, edited by J. Middleton Murry. 2 vols., 1928.

Novels and Novelists (reviews), edited by J. Middleton Murry. 1930.

Scrapbook, edited by J. Middleton Murry. 1939.

Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913-1922, edited by J. MiddletonMurry. 1951.

Passionate Pilgrimage: A Love Affair in Letters: Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry from the South of France 1915-1920, edited by Helen McNeish. 1976.

Letters and Journals: A Selection, edited by C. K. Stead. 1977.

The Urewera Notebook, edited by Ian A. Gordon. 1978.

Collected Letters, edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and MargaretScott. 1984-1996.

The Critical Writings, edited by Clare Hanson. 1987.

Letters Between Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, edited by Cherry Hankin. 1988.

Selected Letters, edited by Vincent O'Sullivan. 1989.

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 1997.

Translator, with S. S. Koteliansky, Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, by Maksim Gor'kii. 1928.

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Bibliography:

Mansfield: Publications in Australia 1907-1909 by Jean E. Stone, 1977; "A Bibliography of Mansfield References 1970-1984" by N. Wattie, in Journal of New Zealand Literature, 1985; A Bibliography of Mansfield by B. J. Kirkpatrick, 1989.

Critical Studies:

Mansfield: A Critical Study by Sylvia Berkman, 1951; Mansfield: A Biography, 1953, and The Life of Mansfield, 1980, both by Antony Alpers; Mansfield by Ian A. Gordon, 1954, revised edition, 1971; Mansfield in Her Letters by Dan Davin, 1959; Mansfield by Saralyn R. Daly, 1965; Mansfield: An Appraisal by Nariman Hormasji, 1967; The Edwardianism of Mansfield by Frederick J. Foot, 1969; The Fiction of Mansfield by Marvin Magalaner, 1971; The Art of Mansfield by Mary Rohrberger, 1977; Mansfield: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers, 1978; Gurdjieff and Mansfield by James Moore, 1980; Mansfield by Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr, 1981; Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories by Cherry Hankin, 1983; A Portrait of Mansfield by Nora Crone, 1985; Mansfield by Kate Fullbrook, 1986; Mansfield: A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin, 1987; Mansfield by Rhoda B. Nathan, 1988; Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer by Gillian Boddy, 1988; Mansfield and Literary Impressionism by Julia Van Gunsteren, 1990; Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction by J. F. Kobler, 1990; Katherine Mansfield's Fictions by Patrick Morrow, 1993; Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, 1993; Female Subjectivity in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories by Simone Elizabeth Murray, 1994; Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond by Nóra Séllei, 1996; Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by Patricia L. Moran, 1996; Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield Short Stories by Pamela Dunbar, 1997.

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Born in New Zealand in 1888 as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, Mansfield managed in her brief life to establish a reputation as one of the finest practitioners of short fiction in English. Five collections of her work were published during her lifetime and her Collected Stories appeared in 1945. (She died of tuberculosis in 1923.) Mansfield mingled stories of delicate poetic evocation, often based on her childhood and adolescence, with others of hard-edged, satiric comedy, such as "The Daughters of the Later Colonel." Her deceptive simplicity and subtlety of style showed the thoroughness with which she had learned the lessons of Chekhov and to a lesser extent Joyce in Dubliners (though she is not above writing wickedly funny parodies of Chekhov in stories like "Green Goggles").

The title story of her second collection, "Bliss," is a fair sample of her work. Thirty-year-old Bertha Young is ecstatically in love with life: "Really—really—she had everything." Mansfield skillfully captures the brittle charm and good humor of the guests at Bertha's dinner party, "just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware," and has Bertha imagining that her friend Pearl Fulton shares her own feelings of joy in life. Only at the end does she discover that Miss Fulton, whom her husband Harry affects to despise, is having an affair with him. Less important then the action, however, is the motif of the pear tree that she and Miss Fulton admire. The story ends ambiguously:

"Oh, what is going to happen now?" she cried. But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.

There is little or no action in most of Mansfield's stories. They work instead by suggestion and evocation. Her adult characters especially are often trapped in unhappy situations they cannot escape, although more hope lies with the children, who often recognize the imperfections of their elders.

Josephine and Constantia in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" are so traumatized by the memory of their tyrannical father that even after his death they are unable to shake off his influence, and this becomes the source of the story's often acerbic comedy:

Josephine had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out?… "Buried. You two girls had me buried!"

As in many of Mansfield's stories the ending is ambiguous, with at least a slim hope held out that the two women will be able to free themselves from the colonel's posthumous influence.

Many of Mansfield's finest stories go back to her childhood in New Zealand, which she portrays as having a surprisingly deep class consciousness. In "The Garden Party," the title story of perhaps her finest collection, the adolescent Laura learns to reject the condescending response of her mother to the news that a young working man has died. "The Doll's House" examines the way in which adults impose their class values upon their children and the latter resist them:

For the fact was, the school the Burnell children went to was not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen if there had been any choice. But there was none. It was the only school for miles. And the consequence was all the children of the neighbourhood, the Judge's little girls, the doctor's daughters, the storekeeper's children, the milk-man's, were forced to mix together.

When the Burnell children receive a wonderful doll's house and disobediently allow the ragged Kelveys to come and see it for a few minutes, a moment of Joycean epiphany occurs to end the story.

Meanings and significances seem to stretch beyond the boundaries of Mansfield's stories. If her comedy is sometimes cruel and her vision bleak, there are often redemptive moments of discovery and hope that counteract the pessimistic tone.

—Laurie Clancy

See the essays on "At the Bay," "The Garden Party," and "Prelude."