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Viaggio in Urewera
In un taccuino riempito da Katherine Mansfield a diciannove anni, durante un viaggio fra i Maori, la materia fantastica di cui saranno fatti i suoi racconti neozelandesi.
101 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1915
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About the author
Katherine Mansfield
976 books1,204 followersKathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
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", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.
Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.
Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.
Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.
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", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.
Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.
Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.
Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 30, 2015
Before Katherine Mansfield left New Zealand, never to return, she took an opportunity to visit a remote part of the country. In the Urewera region there were still small Maori communities and stretches of country not yet transformed into pasture by settlers. Not that it was “untouched”, as sentimentalists claimed, for there were also small settler communities and farms. As she travelled, she wrote down impressions in a notebook – not systematically enough for a diary and mingled with notes about other matters, such as shopping lists and the like.
The Urewera Notebook has been edited by others and published before, but Anna Plumridge was persuaded by the community of Mansfield scholars and enthusiasts to try again, because none of the other three editions was accurate or consistent enough to provide a reliable picture of the writer observing her home country. As part of her excellent introductory material, Plumridge explains how the personal motivations and preoccupations of earlier editors shaped the material they presented: in the so-called Definitive Edition of Mansfield’s “journal” John Middleton Murry was driven, as in all of his Mansfield editions, by his urge to idealise his deceased wife and to justify his own role in her life as well, in this case, by his ignorance of what she was writing about; Ian A. Gordon, who was close to her family, wanted to counter the impression made by Gordon and others that Mansfield had been a wilful teenager in her Wellington years, irritated by and rebellious against her parents and her country, and in making this effort he turned her into something less credible, the product of a “supportive and stimulating upbringing”; while Margaret Scott in her edition of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks was anxious to use Mansfield as a “raft” to bear her away from her own shipwreck. All of these editors also took liberties with punctuation, because Mansfield’s “notes” were just that, rather than coherent texts.
Plumridge’s meticulous presentation of these issues, which are of importance to Mansfield readers, especially those who treat her (dubiously in my view) as a “national icon”, is illuminating, and the rest of her “General Introduction” – placing this text within Mansfield’s biography, giving a more coherent and broader account of the camping trip than the Notebook itself provides, explaining Plumridge’s own “editorial procedures”, supplying biographical notes on other members of the group and describing events – is no less so. Even the relatively technical matters relating to transcription and textual presentation can be read with interest by readers who might otherwise find such matters dry and dull. The text of the Notebook itself is liberally supplied with explanatory footnotes, useful for those who don’t know the background and even for those who do.
In short, this is a fine piece of editing work, of value to all Mansfield enthusiasts and to those whose interests may be more in the topography and history of New Zealand. The publishers have also made their contribution to presenting the material elegantly and clearly.
The Urewera Notebook has been edited by others and published before, but Anna Plumridge was persuaded by the community of Mansfield scholars and enthusiasts to try again, because none of the other three editions was accurate or consistent enough to provide a reliable picture of the writer observing her home country. As part of her excellent introductory material, Plumridge explains how the personal motivations and preoccupations of earlier editors shaped the material they presented: in the so-called Definitive Edition of Mansfield’s “journal” John Middleton Murry was driven, as in all of his Mansfield editions, by his urge to idealise his deceased wife and to justify his own role in her life as well, in this case, by his ignorance of what she was writing about; Ian A. Gordon, who was close to her family, wanted to counter the impression made by Gordon and others that Mansfield had been a wilful teenager in her Wellington years, irritated by and rebellious against her parents and her country, and in making this effort he turned her into something less credible, the product of a “supportive and stimulating upbringing”; while Margaret Scott in her edition of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks was anxious to use Mansfield as a “raft” to bear her away from her own shipwreck. All of these editors also took liberties with punctuation, because Mansfield’s “notes” were just that, rather than coherent texts.
Plumridge’s meticulous presentation of these issues, which are of importance to Mansfield readers, especially those who treat her (dubiously in my view) as a “national icon”, is illuminating, and the rest of her “General Introduction” – placing this text within Mansfield’s biography, giving a more coherent and broader account of the camping trip than the Notebook itself provides, explaining Plumridge’s own “editorial procedures”, supplying biographical notes on other members of the group and describing events – is no less so. Even the relatively technical matters relating to transcription and textual presentation can be read with interest by readers who might otherwise find such matters dry and dull. The text of the Notebook itself is liberally supplied with explanatory footnotes, useful for those who don’t know the background and even for those who do.
In short, this is a fine piece of editing work, of value to all Mansfield enthusiasts and to those whose interests may be more in the topography and history of New Zealand. The publishers have also made their contribution to presenting the material elegantly and clearly.
February 8, 2017
I had a feeling that Mansfield's Urewera Notebook wouldn't be at all useful for my thesis, but when I spotted it upon the Modernist shelves in my University's library, I had to take it away with me. It both sounded fascinating, and was focused upon an element of Mansfield's life which I have read comparatively little about to date. The Urewera Notebook is essentially a series of diary entries and photographs from a camping trip which she took in her native New Zealand at the age of nineteen. It was fascinating to learn about colonial and historical issues through her eyes. Her writing is, unsurprisingly, beautiful, and she vividly conjures scenes. There is a wonderful breathy quality to the whole. Her experience clearly influenced and inspired her more rural short stories. The Urewera Notebook is a joy to read, but is sadly not overly extensive.
May 31, 2012
A journal, with commentary, of a camping trip KM made from Hawkes Bay to the Ureweras in 1907. In those days it was not a journey for the faint-hearted! Fascinating to feel her interest and enthusiasm for the people she met and the places she visited and to get a glimpse of how connected she was to the landscape, fauna and flora. Some of her encounters on this trip sparked ideas for later stories - so I then read those with interest.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews