Pamela Norris
A Short Story
Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller
By Kathleen Jones
Edinburgh University Press 524pp £25
The writer known as Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis in January 1923. She was only thirty-four, and her work had been interrupted by lack of money and a settled home, and increasingly by illness. Despite these impediments, she published several collections of short stories, and left other stories, poems, reviews, notebooks and letters, which were edited for publication over the next thirty years by her husband, the critic and writer John Middleton Murry. Often praised for her modernist approach, Mansfield’s aim as a writer was to record her observations of life as truthfully as possible, drawing freely on her New Zealand childhood, her travels in Europe and her emotional attachments to both men and women. Detail fascinated her, whether of landscape, interiors or the nuances of personal relationships, and she developed a technique of allowing a story to unfold through the private thoughts and actions of her characters, often cunningly shifting perspective by moving from one character’s consciousness to another’s. Particularly striking is her ability to expand some apparently minor scene or incident into universal significance, whether the deception of an innocent girl in ‘The Little Governess’ or the humiliation of an impoverished teacher in ‘Miss Brill’.
Like Sylvia Plath (whose husband also edited her work for posthumous publication), Mansfield’s output, although distinctive, was slender, and it is the details of her life, as much as her literary achievements, that have kept her in the public eye. Like Plath, she was a sexually active young
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk