Mansfield

by C.K. Stead

Book Overview

C.K. Stead's fictionalised account of Katherine Mansfield's life describes her search to write the new kind of fiction towards which she strives. The author sticks scrupulously to what is known about... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1843431769
• ISBN13: 9781843431763
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

BLOOMSBURY GROUPIES

`What a funny place this is!' says one of the Bloomsbury Group's hangers-on to Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Beauchamp, and one of the foremost modernist writers of her time). `Such brilliant people saying such silly things.'' This comment just about sums up - not this superbly punctilious portrayal of Katherine Mansfield's creative years by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar C K Stead - but the quite laughable overweening inconsequentiality of a group of writers who, like the Algonquin Round Table in a different time and place, were so utterly convinced that the sun shone out of their art. Various members of the group are sighted here together with assorted camp-followers: Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, Lady Ottline Morell on whom he based the man-eating Lady Chatterley, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, J M Keynes - and that other `bugger' (as the aforementioned hanger-on so describes him) the insufferably bitchy Lytton Strachey . . . every one of them housepartying for England while the world goes to hell in a handcart. `Last night . . .' trills the same silly also-ran, `. . . we(took) a vote on whether the moon was a virgin or a harlot.' Ah! time for Miss Mansfield to prove her mettle, I thought: because I really rate a lot of her stuff. How's she going to handle this latest bit of silliness. Oh, dear! I was to be quickly disappointed. `How did it come out?' says she. Plus points: there are some wonderful set pieces here - D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda having a domestic spat in the course of which they reveal themselves to be just as vain and childishly pathetic as lesser mortals having a domestic spat; and an achingly graphic depiction of the violent death in action during WWI of Katherine's beloved brother Leslie, and of Fred Goodyear being mortally wounded. Kathleen Mansfield can write like an angel when the fancy takes her, and when a quite different fancy takes her, acts like a tramp. Consequently her lover of long-standing, John Middleton Murry, leads a veritable dog's life. Leslie Beauchamp and Fred Goodyear apart, the men of her acquaintance are all principled pacifists, the principle in question being they are quite doggedly determined to dodge the draft. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of her women friends are ninnies in need of assistance to boil an egg or run a hot bath. In fairness, though, it must be allowed that Katherine Mansfield isn't one of these, though she does appear to have developed a brand of existentialism for her own personal use: `I can,' you can almost hear her thinking, `therefore I will.' And may the devil take the hindmost, which means, of course, poor, long-suffering, affable, almost totally ineffectual John Middleton Murry, who is unlucky enough to be Katherine Mansfield's artistic and intellectual inferior - and saddled with her.