are evanescent, unreal, created in the process of reading and re-reading. Now you see them, now you don’t. But that temptation to read between the lines is again a modern and modernist effect. It is a way, perhaps, of implying a shared world of meanings without exactly mapping it out, or giving it solidity. Mansfield’s stories come together rather as people come together in some public place – the park, the square, the theatre, or indeed at a party, which is why she chose the right title for the book. Leonard Woolf, sounding less dismayed than Virginia, said, ‘By nature, I think, she was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, witty…’ (The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf, Vol. III, London, 1964, p. 204). By which he implied that the tragic accident of her illness and early death, at thirty-four in 1923, had turned her against her real grain. It’s impossible, of course, to tell whether this was so. However, it is striking that some of the best brief critical notes on her, by other women writers, have refused to see her as a figure of pathos, but emphasized instead her bloody-mindedness. Thus Brigid Brophy in a piece for the London Magazine in 1962 contrived to imply that her death from consumption was somehow self-created, a kind of turning inwards of her consuming passion: ‘Katherine Mansfield had indeed a cannibal imagination… When Katherine Mansfield refused to undertake a proper cure for her illness, she was acting out what she had written years before as a healthy but wrought-up adolescent: ”I shall end – of course – by killing myself.” The disease through which she did kill herself was consumption… the cannibal disease which consumes its victim…’ (pp. 46–7). This seems far too late-Romantic a view. Mansfield was not a prototype for Sylvia Plath, she absolutely didn’t want to die young. However, one can appreciate Brophy’s motive, which is, somehow, to make sense of Mansfield’s suffering, make it an active act, not a passive thing. Another writer who praised Mansfield along similar lines, for her aggressiveness, was Angela Carter: ‘one of the great traps for the woman writer is the desire to be loved for oneself as well as admired for one’s work, to be a Beautiful Person as well as a Great Artist, and Katherine Mansfield was only saved from a narcissistic self-regard by the tough bitchery under her parade of sensitive vulnerability’ (1972, Nothing Sacred, 1982).
This tone brings one back to Woolf‘s response to the rival writer – and yet the intimately recognizable writer – marking out her distinctive territory. The Garden Party and Other Stories was Mansfield’s last book. She was too ill even to complete many individual stories after it was finished: the rest of the short time she had left was spent in an increasingly desperate search for cures and miracles. At the very end she joined a bizarre, visionary commune in Fontainebleau. run by the Russian guru Gurdjieff, a kind of eccentric circus which gave her some peace at last. It was an improbable version of belonging, but it served. In her work she was and remains one of the great modernist writers of displacement, restlessness, mobility, impermanence. The very vividness of her New Zealand writing bears this out. She wanted, she said, ‘to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World… It must be mysterious. It must take the breath.’ Her own words are in the end the best introduction – she wrote so well about writing, since she invested the life she wouldn’t see again in it: ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.’
Further Reading
OTHER WORKS BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Fiction
In a German Pension, London: Stephen Swift, 1911; New York: Knopf, 1926; ed. Anne Fernihough, Harmondsworth: Penguin (forthcoming 1998)
Bliss and Other Stories, London: Constable, 1920; New York: Knopf, 1922; ed. Julia Briggs, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997
Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, New York: Knopf, 1937; London: Constable, 1945; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989
The Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ‘Definitive Edition