The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. She affects her readers in a similar way.Īfter Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The impression she left on those who knew her was strong and ambiguous.

Yet Katherine Mansfield was always divisive, wherever she was received. Our often grudging admiration perhaps has the cast of a distinctively local attitude to high artistic achievement. And, if we want to add one more voice to this roll-call of mixed, self-clashing responses: the Irish writer Frank O’Connor, in his classic study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, called Mansfield ‘the brassy little shopgirl of literature who made herself into a great writer.’Īs New Zealanders we tend to think we have invented the ambivalence that surrounds our most famous writer.

Eliot found her ‘a fascinating personality’ but also ‘a thick-skinned toady’ and ‘a dangerous woman’. It was a small and cryptic gesture of reconciliation they’d fallen out badly and in his previous letter he had said ‘You are a loathsome reptile-I hope you will die.’ T.S. Lawrence, with whom Mansfield had a fraught friendship, visited Wellington, her birthplace, and was moved to send Mansfield a postcard bearing a single Italian word, ‘Ricordi’ (‘memories’). the more she is praised, the more I am convinced she is bad.’ D.H. Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ Woolf also, jealously, wrote, ‘. If she was never a saint, she was certainly a martyr, and a heroine in her recklessness, her dedication and her courage.’ The Great Ghost In the words of one of her biographers, ‘It was largely through her adventurous spirit, her eagerness to grasp at experience and to succeed in her work, that she became ensnared in disaster. Famously, Mansfield remarked ‘risk, risk everything’. Katherine Mansfield’s brief life was also a lesson in casting off convention. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness-its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong.

Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. ‘I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened.’ Katherine Mansfield, letter to John Middleton Murry, 18 October 1920 Student Resource: study ideas, questions and activities (pdf)

Glück by Katherine Mansfield