Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Katherine Mansfield

Hi Dear Folk,

I often listen to BBC Radio 4.  This week they are running a reading of five of Katherine Mansfield's short stories.


  • The Stranger
  • Miss Brill
  • A Cup of Tea
  • Poison
  • The Doll's House


She is a brilliant Short Story writer and well worth reading, I love Miss Brill.

Katherine Mansfield was brought up in New Zealand; which I've always felt an affinity with, because my great grandmothers half siblings, Mary and James, who my great grandma was very close with emigrated to New Zealand the year before WWI.

A regular correspondence was kept up with them.  In fact after my grandfather died 1938 of Polio, and grandma was left a widow with four children, they invited her to migrate to New Zealand after WWII and I often wonder what that would have meant for the family had my grandmother taken them up on that.  I honestly think she personally would have had an easier life, rather than staying on in post war England.  But I digress.  Click on my New Zealand label on side bar to see some old family photos taken in New Zealand.

Katherine Mansfield 1888-1923 did not have an easy life and eventually died of tuberculosis.  She had many contemporaries and was friends with such people as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Elizabeth Von Arnim was a cousin.

As with many New Zealand writers she made the trek and relocated to London, on a more permanent basis in 1908, she had lived there before from age 14 to 17 as a boarder at Queen's College, Harley Street.

After her diagnoses she often lived abroad on the Continent, one place being the Montana region of Switzerland where she wrote many short stories.  The Montana Stories published by Persephone Books contains her short stories from July 1921 to her death in France, January 1923.

I ran across this lovely link to the Katherine Mansfield Society where you can read her stories.

Off down the rabbit hole now.

Christine

P.S. A quote from Virginia Woolf

"...then Morgan Forster said the Prelude and The Voyage Out were the best novels of their time, and I said damn Katherine! Why can't I be the only woman who knows how to write."  Virginia Woolf writing to Katherine Mansfield, 13 February 1921

1 comment:

  1. Sounds interesting. Will have a look. I do like radio 4.

    ReplyDelete

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