A closer look at Katherine Mansfield

'She seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17...'

Hello friends!

We will be reading Mrs Dalloway in June, so now is the time to track down a copy of the book if you haven’t already.

In the meantime, I thought we could take a look at a couple of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield who was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf. I love Mansfield’s short stories. They are so vivid and thrumming with life. Mansfield could write place beautifully (‘At the Bay’), she wrote sensitively and realistically about children (‘Prelude,’ ‘The Dolls House’), she wrote about class (‘The Garden Party’), she was funny (‘The Dove’s Nest,’ unfinished at the time of her death), and she had an excellent ear for dialogue and different registers of speech (‘Marriage à la Mode,’ ‘Life of Ma Parker,’ in fact, nearly anything of hers).

What we will read first

Let’s start with ‘Marriage à la Mode.’ It’s part of The Garden Party and other Stories collection but it’s also available online here. Please go ahead and read it if you’d like to join in the discussion and we’ll tackle it in a week’s time.

Katherine and Virginia

Katherine Mansfield was born and grew up in New Zealand. She was educated for a short time in England and returned at age 20. Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield knew one another and had a slightly fraught relationship, largely due to their mutual competitiveness. They were very different. In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee points out that Katherine’s colonialism and her itinerant uprootedness were the opposite of Virginia’s ancestral network.¹ Lee describes them as utterly different in looks, temperament and experience but with some strong affinities, not least their fierce dedication to their work.²

Despite their rivalrous relationship and moments of prickliness and distrust, Katherine and Virginia visited one another many times and their conversations about writing were vivid and exciting. In 1918, Katherine wrote to a friend that Virginia ‘was very nice’ and that she ‘does take the writing business seriously and she is honest about it & thrilled by it. One can’t ask more.’³ In 1919, Virginia would confess to her diary, ‘as usual, I find with Katherine what I don’t find with other clever women a sense of ease & interest, which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art.’⁴ ‘To no one else,’ wrote Virginia in her diary in 1920, ‘can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here.’⁵ ‘I wonder if you know what your visits were to me,’ Katherine wrote to Virginia later the same year, ‘–or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another.’⁶

Tragically, Katherine died at only 34 from tuberculosis which she likely contracted from DH Lawrence. After her death in 1923, Virginia felt that there was ‘no point in writing any more’ – ‘Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.’⁷ In a review of Katherine’s journals on their publication, Virginia wrote: ‘No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did. In all the pages of her journal, instinctive, rapid as they are, her attitude to her work is admirable; sane, caustic, and austere. There is no literary gossip; no vanity; no jealously. Although during her last years she must have been aware of her success she makes no allusion to it. Her own comments upon her work are always penetrating and disparaging.’⁸

To read more about Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, I encourage you to stop by

Victoria K. Walker

’s substack, Beyond Bloomsbury and her piece Katherine & Virginia: Friends or Foes?

And I’ll see you in a week to talk about ‘Marriage à la Mode’!

1. See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage Books, 1996, p 382.

2. See Lee, p 382.

3. Letter from Katherine Mansfield to Dorothy Brett, 12 May 1918, quoted in Lee, p 387.

4. Diary entry of 22 March 1919, Diary of Virginia Woolf - Volume 1 - 1915-19, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 1977, p 258.

5. Diary entry of 5 June 1920, quoted in Lee, p 391.

6. Letter from Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf, 27 December 1920, quoted in Lee, p 392.

7. Diary entry of 28 January 1923, quoted in Lee, p 393.

8. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind,’ Granite and Rainbow, 1958.