Meet the writers: Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.
Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that ‘Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.’ It is a formulation that captures wonderfully the current position of Mansfield. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life.
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield left for London in 1908 aged 20, never to return to New Zealand. In the context of a long and arduous sea journey – six or seven weeks—this might not appear significant. Later in her life, she was frequently incapacitated by illness and never able to return to her hometown. Howeverm her biographers also consider that it is obvious that she saw no point in a return voyage to her birthplace—and that has had an effect on how New Zealanders see her. Though D.H. Lawrence believed the most important fact about her was that she was a colonial, Mansfield can seem to her own people, at first glance, ‘too English’. And yet her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the ’edge of the world’ as she felt it to be. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.
Mansfield’s relationship with her country of birth was, like most of her relationships, marked by extremes. In the beginning, as a precocious, literary schoolgirl, she despaired of her uncouth colonial home where ‘people don’t even know their alphabet’. As a mature writer she found in that ‘hopeless’ material a way of pushing the boundaries of the form—in the words of her biographer, Antony Alpers, a means of ‘revolutionising the English short story’.
Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including “Miss Brill”, “Prelude”, “The Garden Party”, “The Doll’s House”, are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian writer Anton Chekhov and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. The fact that Mansfield died relatively young - thirty-four years old, by Tuberculosis - only added to her legacy.
Source: http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html and Wikipedia
