Book Description
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) published three collections of short stories-In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party-during her tragically shortlife, and was acclaimed as one of modernism's most daring and original writers. After her death from tuberculosis in France, Mansfield's private writings and letters were edited by her husband, John Middleton Murry, and published in four volumes between 1927 and 1954. Murry, however, took liberties in recasting his wife's journals and notes. He excluded most of the vast mass of material and revised much of what he included, resulting in a distorted image of Mansfield as a passive, ethereal spirit.

More than four decades later, the real Mansfield finally emerges in The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, the first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed by editor Margaret Scott, these infrequent diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman who was ambitious and at times ruthless, neurotic and sexually voracious, witty and acerbic, fascinated with the minutiae of daily life and obsessed with death.

"It is only now, with the publication of Margaret Scott's complete and unselective transcription of the material bequeathed to Murry, that we can really see Mansfield, off her guard and unexpurgated, for the first time. . . . Mansfield's notebooks are remarkable, touched by a sense of the underlying pathos of things, two parts tragedy and two parts comedy." Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Mansfield's work speaks about what is irretrievably lost, material, mortal, unless it is turned to artifice-and nowhere more than in these notebooks, where she is so reluctantly introspective." London Review of Books

Margaret Scott is National Library research fellow at New Zealand's National Library in Wellington. She has coedited five volumes of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Katherine Mansfield, unedited
Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 of tuberculosis while still a young woman, gave us many glimpses into her private psyche when her celebrated "Journal" was published. But editor Margaret Scott, in assembling "The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks" gives us a more intimate perspective by supplementing the already famous journal entries with poems, half-finished stories, and even recipes and shopping lists. The result is an addicting mix of literary divinity and the charming mundane.

These faithfully reproduced writings reveal Katherine Mansfield to have been a highly strung, creative genious with an obession about her own mortality. Equal parts tragedy and comedy, reading "The Notebooks" is the closest that any of us will ever come to knowing Mansfield herself. It's an advantage that not even her husband, J. Middleton Murray, experienced during her lifetime. ... Read more

Book Description
The letters is this volume cover the eighteen months katherine Mansfield spent in England, France, and Switzerland from May 1920 to the end of 1921.It is the period of her finest stories, and when her life took its most decisive turn.There is a subtle but unmistakable change in her expectations, a new 'spiritual' insistence that is both elusive and resolute.From her Chekovian acceptance that 'they are cutting down the cherry trees' she derives a tough existential directness: 'the little boat enters the dark, fearful gulf...Nobody listens.The shadowy figure rows on.One ought to sit still and uncover one's eyes.'There is a determined push - not always successful - towards a necessary honesty, as much as to artistic achievement; while those qualities of her earlier correspondence remain undiminished - the precision and directness, the intelligence and wit, the dark incisiveness as much as sheer fun.Above all, perhaps, these letters comprise a record of very considerable courage, against increasingly adverse odds, as they approach the final years of her life. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Born in New Zealand in 1888, Katherine Mansfield left Wellington when she was nineteen to begin a career as a writer in London. In the years that followed, she received critical acclaim and counted among her friends T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley. Since her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1923, her writings have drawn increasingly varied critical attention. Through a collection of essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical response to Mansfield's writings. The volume includes the earliest reviews of her work in 1911 through the most recent examinations of her fiction. Though the pieces included are written in English, some essays discuss her links with Europe and with French, German, and Asian critics. An introductory essay and chronology briefly overview the critical reception of her work, and a selected bibliography lists bibliographical, biographical, and critical studies. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume, the second of four, includes her correspondence from early 1918 to the autumn of 1919. Her love for Middleton Murry, her response to the First World War, and her acceptance of the inevitable advance of tuberculosis, are handled with wit and warmth, in a text which has been transcribed afresh from the original letters. ... Read more

Book Description
Comprising only a small segment of renowned short story writer Katherine Mansfield's work, the New Zealand stories were written within a five year span between 1918 and 1922. However, they were never published as a group until 1974 and have rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Katherine Dickson's study, a close textual analysis, reveals these stories as proto-postcolonial narrative which reward close scrutiny by the serious scholar. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An extremely intelligent, thorough, and interesting analysis
This book adds significantly to the understanding of Katherine Mansfield and her New Zealand stories.I enjoyed it very much. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Book Description
The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920.It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress.Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial.This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed.Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends.As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving and receiving, and shedding and renewing, and examining and trying to place'.For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time. ... Read more

Product Description
Unabridged audiobook in MP3 format. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The lifetime of one of our greatest writers
I first heard of this book in a 1927 review of it by Dorothy Parker (available in the 1944 edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, as well as subsequent editions I believe, including the 1973 one). Parker's review is beautifully apt. She says, "I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is the record of six lonely and tormented years, the life's-end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it." Mansfield suffered from a heart condition and later tuberculosis which kept her in a constant state of physical misery for years. Even worse for her was the constant torment of never being able to achieve enough as a writer to satisfy herself. Parker is completely right: I can't think of who could capture that constant, acute sorrow better than Katherine Mansfield. As Parker said, "She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied."

If you've never read her short stories (she never wrote anything else), please do, and I would advise you to read them before you read her journal.

The book itself seems like it could be published as a stream-of-consciousness novel (it's impossible to follow at times but no worse for it. It seems to make perfect sense - even the numerous cryptic little notes). It's full of little pieces of stories never finished. Mansfield's body of work was so small (something that upset her deeply) that these little fragments would be enough to make any fan of hers need to read this journal.

She is most often compared to Chekhov, and it's not difficult to see why. I truly believe that Mansfield innovated and practically invented the English (language) short story. Besides Chekhov (whom she often mentions in her journal) I've never read anything quite like her, particularly not anything that predates her.

What else you need to know:
1. Mansfield was born in New Zealand, the influence of which can be seen in short stories like "At the Bay".
2. Her husband, J. Middleton Murry, published her journals, causing some to accuse him of taking advantage of her.
3. You must read this book.

5 stars is not enough
I first heard of this book in a 1927 review of it by Dorothy Parker (available in the 1944 edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, as well as subsequent editions I believe, including the 1973 one). Parker's review is beautifully apt.She says, "I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is the record of six lonely and tormented years, the life's-end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it." Mansfield suffered from a heart condition and later tuberculosis which kept her in a constant state of physical misery for years. Even worse for her was the constant torment of never being able to achieve enough as a writer to satisfy herself. Parker is completely right: I can't think of who could capture that constant, acute sorrow better than Katherine Mansfield. As Parker said, "She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied."

If you've never read her short stories (she never wrote anything else), please do, and I would advise you to read them before you read her journal.

The book itself seems like it could be published as a stream-of-consciousness novel (it's impossible to follow at times but no worse for it. It seems to make perfect sense - even the numerous cryptic little notes). It's full of little pieces of stories never finished. Mansfield's body of work was so small (something that upset her deeply) that these little fragments would be enough to make any fan of hers need to read this journal.

She is most often compared to Chekhov, and it's not difficult to see why. I truly believe that Mansfield innovated and practically invented the English (language) short story. Besides Chekhov (whom she often mentions in her journal) I've never read anything quite like her, particularly not anything that predates her.

What else you need to know:
1. Mansfield was born in New Zealand, the influence of which can be seen in short stories like "At the Bay".
2. Her husband, J. Middleton Murry, published her journals, causing some to accuse him of taking advantage of her.
3. You must read this book.

It is not just a book, it is a guide for happiness.
Both Katherine and her work are like a flower that has grown within the weeds that make up life. ... Read more

Book Description
Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time
when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Surprise!
I came at this book from the Mansfield camp and a little exhausted by all of the stale comparisons between Mansfield and Woolf.However, Smith's work is full of well-researched and thoughtful analysis.It's an amazing study--particularly of Mansfield, I think--and one that belongs on the same shelf as Kaplan's KM & THE ORIGINS OF MODERNIST FICTION and Dunbar's RADICAL MANSFIELD.Essential reading for Mansfield scholars and fans alike.

A Surprise!
I came at this book with an interest in Mansfield (and to a lesser extent Woolf) and was tired of the countless studies (chapters and essays) comapring the two.Needless to say, then, I approached this study with trepidation and assumed I would not think much of it.But what a surprise!Smith has done a terrific job with her research and has produced a study that towers over the others I've seen.The study smells of sweat and hard work. I put it alongside Sidney Janet Kaplan's and Patricia Dunbar's studies of Mansfield. It is one of the best. ... Read more

Book Description

Katherine Mansfield is remembered for writing brilliant short stories that helped to initiate the modernist period in British fiction, and for the fact that her life--lived at a feverish pace on the fringes of Bloomsbury during the First World War--ended after a prolonged battle with pulmonary disease when she was only thirty-four years old. While her life was marred by emotional and physical afflictions of the most extreme kind, argues Mary Burgan in Illness, Gender, and Writing, her stories have seemed to exist in isolation from those afflictions--as stylish expressions of the "new," as romantic triumphs of art over tragic circumstances, or as wavering expressions of Mansfield's early feminism.

In the first book to look at the continuum of a writer's life and work in terms of that writer's various illnesses, Burgan explores Katherine Mansfield's recurrent emotional and physical afflictions as the ground of her writing.

Mansfield is remarkably suited to this approach, Burgan contends, because her "illnesses" ranged from such early psychological afflictions as separation anxiety, body image disturbances, and fear of homosexuality to bodily afflictions that included miscarriage and abortion, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. Offering a thorough and provocative reading of Mansfield's major texts, Illness, Gender, and Writing shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women'screativity. Mansfield's drive toward self-integration, Burgan concludes, was her strategy for writing--and for staying alive.

"An outstanding psychobiographical study of Mansfield's life and creative struggle. It provides solid commentary on the major stories and will be cited and debated by all subsequent Mansfield scholars. It is the most sustained analysis of Mansfield's psychological conflicts--and the way those conflicts produce literary texts--and a strong addition to the new tradition of `body criticism.'"--Steven Gould Axelrod, University of California, Riverside

Book Description
In a letter, Katherine Mansfield wrote: "I hate the sort of license that English people give themselves--to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid." This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fauvist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Easy read, good scholarship
If you're new to Katherine Mansfield, this is a good book to start with.Smith opens some doors for the novice or scholar.You might want to buy Vincent O'Sullivan's recent anthology published by Norton to use as your reading copy of KM's works.It's easy to find Antony Alper's excellent full length biography.It's essential reading too.If you are serious about your reading, Alpers also edited her works (Oxford U Press), and it's worth tracking down a copy -- not just for the logical arrangement of the text, but for his excellent notes. ... Read more