"Come, my unseen, my unknwon, let us talk together" - KM´s Journal
Anne E. Rice: Portrait of Katherine Mansfield
During the course of her life Katherine Mansfield considered her not one, but many selves, in many different ways. According to Clarin Tomalin (one of her biographers), - Mansfield transformed into multiple alternative versions to suit different moods, different friends, diferent facets of her personality: Kass, Katie, KM, Mansfield, Katherine, Julian Mark, Katherine Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Katharina, Katiushka, Kissienka, Elizabeth Stanley, and Tig. These are a whole bunch of names! Katiushka and Kissienka, I believe, were due to the fact that she really loved Chekhov - who was a also a great influence on the way she developed her short stories.
Her stories, although so sad sometimes, are fascinating. I was struck by them at the time I was in college and the first one i could read was Miss Brill. This story is a perfect description of the human loneliness of an old lady. Most of them deal with these simple situations of one´s life: she wrote basically about how difficult was for a woman to live in a world of men. Some of her themes were so unusual for the time she was a writer, like the story «At the Bay» in which she reveals the fact that the main character, Linda Burnell, has this deepest grudge against life because she had to be a mother instead of an adventurer «in the rivers of China». There is this special scene in which she looks at her baby boy and admits she doesnt like him - it is really a beautiful scene for such a sad revelation.
She had to be a very strong woman at the time she decided to leave her family in New Zealand - where she was born - in order to try to be a writer in London and gather all the experiences she could get in her life. And she did have a bunch of these experiences: she lived the First World War years and travelled around Europe very often, just by herself. Unfortunately, they did not end very well - she died from a tuberculosis. However, she strongly wrote until the very last days of her life.
This part of Hampstead recalls Katherine to me - that faint ghost, with the steady eyes, the mocking lips, &, at the end, the wreath set on her hair - Virgina Woolf in 1925
Mansfield was also known to be the friend (and at the same time the rival) of another famous writer: Virgina Woolf. At the time Mansfield died, Woolf published a letter feeling quite devastated about the matter. Woolf also used to say that both of them shared something special: «What a queer fate it is - always to be the spectator of the public, never part of it. This is part of the reason why I go weekly see K.M in Hampstead, for there at any rate we make a public of two» (Virgina Woolf´s diary - 1918).
I had the luckiest fate by choosing to make my master in Women´s Studies here, because one of my teachers, who is helping me in my paper, also has a masters in KM´s fiction. It has been very good to study about this crazy life she had and to go deep down in her short stories, cause some of them have changed in me the way i see some things in life.
One of many letters Woolf wrote to Mansfield
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