Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Katherine Mansfield
-
Standard Name: Mansfield, Katherine
Birth Name: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
Nickname: Wig
Nickname: Kissienka
Married Name: Kathleen Mansfield Murry
Self-constructed Name: Katherine Mansfield
Pseudonym: Katherine Mansfield
Pseudonym: K. M.
Pseudonym: Boris Petrovsky
KM
's life was short and much of her writing experimental or oriented towards earning. Though contemporary reviewers sometimes condescended to her youth, gender, and magazine publication, she is now seen as one of our great modernists, her innovations so familiar as to be unnoticeable.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, 12 Apr. 2013, pp. 25-6.
25
As well as one of the most interesting and original short-story writers of the Modernist movement, she was a significant letter-writer and diarist. Her poetry, too, is of interest. Claire Tomalin remarked that her diary in particular has made her a cult figure for young women.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
"Katherine Mansfield, in profile" by Bettmann,1900-01-02.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/katherine-mansfield-british-writer-photograph-news-photo/514882402.
LS and Zhimo continued to work together and he championed her work: he called her, approvingly, the Chinese Katherine Mansfield because of her style and her emphasis on the inner lives of women and girls...
Intertextuality and Influence
Victoria Cross
Sewell Stokes
, in a brief portrait of VC
in 1928, described her as one who had at one time been accused of poisoning the purity of British homes with her sordid writings ....
Intertextuality and Influence
Rumer Godden
As a very young woman RC discovered Katherine Mansfield
's journals and found them a revelation and a springboard.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Her own life-writing, however, is less immediate, more worked on. It is often very close to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
As a tribute to institutions of shared literacy and collective engagement, many of the stories here involve reading within and through the public sphere. Two are dedicated to the friendship between D. H. Lawrence
and...
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth von Arnim
EA
also influenced her cousin Katherine Mansfield
(then Kathleen Beauchamp). EA
's biographer, Karen Usborne
, describes how the young Kathleen frequently reread a copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden that she had received...
Intertextuality and Influence
Constance Garnett
On reading these translations, Katherine Mansfield
wrote to CG
: As I laid down my copy of War and Peace tonight I knew I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other...
Intertextuality and Influence
J. K. Rowling
Robert Galbraith has his own website, which details his military background and his work first for the military police and then in private security. He says his flamboyant, unusual mother came from Cornwall and went...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Richardson
Susan Miles
satirized DR
's and Katherine Mansfield
's writing in Two Novelists, a piece published in the London Mercury.
Richardson, Dorothy. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Editor Fromm, Gloria G., University of Georgia Press, 1995.
60-1
Leisure and Society
Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO
described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Leisure and Society
Eleanor Farjeon
EF
seems never to have read the modernist male poets, Eliot or Pound or Auden; however, she did read and appreciate such women as Rosamond Lehmann
, Storm Jameson
, Katherine Mansfield
, and Virginia Woolf
.
Farjeon, Annabel. Morning has Broken: A Biography of Eleanor Farjeon. Julia MacRae, 1986.
181
Literary responses
Catherine Carswell
According to CC
's son, this was the first time a first novel had won the Melrose Prize. She offered half the prize money of £250 to her friend and literary mentor D. H. Lawrence
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
Quentin Bell reports that [a]s always, [Woolf] found publication an agitating business, and that when she received her own six copies, on 20 October, she immediately dispatched one to each of Vanessa
, Clive Bell
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Other reviews of the book, which appeared immediately after its publication, were not altogether positive. Katherine Mansfield
, in the Athenæum, commented that even while DR
's talent for reproducing the minute details of...