Selected Letters

by Katherine Mansfield, Vincent O'Sullivan (Editor)

This completely new selection of Katherine Mansfield's correspondence draws from the five volumes of her Collected Letters currently being published by Clarendon Press, and ranges from the period of her adolescence to shortly before her death twenty years later. The letters, many of which are
to John Middleton Murry, Lady Ottoline Morrell, S.S. Koteliansky, the painters Anne Estelle Drey, and Dorothy Brett, as well as her own family, literary friends, and chance aquaintances chart her wide range of writing styles and reveal the vitality, warmth, and wit that places Mansfield among the
most poignant and entertaining of modern letterwriters.

Hardcover

Published October 12, 1989

About the author

Kathleen 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.

Reviews

[Manon Auger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lire des lettres est toujours une activité de lecture un peu déstabilisante: d'une part, elles n'ont pas été écrites pour nous et nous n'avons pas les réponses des correspondants; d'autre part, c'est renoncer à la linéarité (les lettres sont pleines de 'trous'). En même temps, c'est comme un merveilleux voyage dans le temps, dans une époque, un milieu. Lire les lettres de Katherine Mansfield m'a fait découvrir une femme extraordinaire et brillante, une femme charmante qui, malgré les épreuves (elle souffrait de tuberculose et a dû passer sa vie à errer d'hôtels et hôtels à la recherche de cieux cléments tandis que son mari qu'elle adorait devait rester en Angleterre) était terriblement vivante et positive. Cela donne envie de mieux connaître son oeuvre et nous fait regretter encore plus son décès prématuré.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are a fan of Mansfield, this little insight into her life is a must-read.