Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View

by Jeffrey Meyers

The works of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), one of England's most gifted short story writers, have influenced over eight decades of writers. A friend to Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell, Mansfield left a literary legacy collected in The Garden Party , In a German Pension , and numerous anthologies. Biographies appearing after her death idealized her, but Meyers sets the record straight in his assessment of the author's life and career, revealing a woman with a self-destructive disdain for convention and respectability. Born and raised in New Zealand, Mansfield threw herself into several love affairs with men and women before living with literary critic John Middleton Murray. Meyers chronicles their tempestuous relationship (one that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Feminism

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently been given an Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thirty of his books have been translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written & absorbing account of the tragically short life of New Zealand's greatest writer.

A complex person who was unhappy growing up in New Zealand,yet longed for it when she was away. A sexually free woman who ended up married to a coward. In this book her second husband Murry comes in for a fair bit of criticism. In fairness, Katherine would never have been an easy person to live with and she wrote some pretty brutal letters to him. I think it's sad her wealthy father also didn't appreciate KM's genius. Meyer writes;

In February 1923, just after Harold was knighted for financial services to New Zealand,he gave £6000 (over twice the total amount he had given Katherine) to help establish a National Gallery of Art in Wellington. If Harold had been a true patron of the arts and shown the same generosity to his daughter as he had to his city, he could easily have eliminated her constant anxiety about money, improved her health and even prolonged her life.

Harsh words indeed. KM would have always been an embarrassment in the conventional New Zealand of the time.

I'm a New Zealander and I did wonder why I didn't get to study Mansfield at school in the 1970s. I guess she was considered too riské for our pure young minds! My Form 2 teacher read our class The Doll's House but that was all. Murry certainly did his best to deify Katherine, but I don't think he was successful!

Highly recommended.

[Michael Canoeist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers got a lot of material that is not to be found in an earlier Anthony Alpers biography of Katherine Mansfield, as best I can recall. A New Zealander who fled her colonial island for more freedom in cosmopolitan London, Mansfield wrote some wonderful short stories that provoked envy in D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, to name just a couple of those who wanted to become her friend. Katherine's defensive self-protectiveness did not prevent her from making rash, impulsive decisions that led to her own self-destruction, dead in her 30s. "The Garden Party" remains a terrific short story and it is fortunate that it got so anthologized, as nowadays it seems that the rest of Mansfield's limited library of writings have been slipping off our radar screens. Stories and The Collected Stories

From a letter by Katherine to Virginia Woolf, p. 137, et alia from Meyers' text: "We have got the same job, Virginia, and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so nearly the same thing." ... Katherine and Virginia were certainly friends, but they were also rivals as women and artists, and deeply distrusted each other.... Both women were highly strung and delicate invalids who, though married, committed themselves to lesbian relationships, and both were childless, lonely, bitter and caustic.... [Katherine] wrote to Ottoline in July 1919: "I confess that I hate them [the Bloomsbury group] because I feel they are enemies of Art -- of real true Art. The snigger is a very awful thing when one is young and the sneer can nearly kill. They profess to live by feeling -- but why then do they never give a sign of it -- and why do they do their very best to ridicule feeling in others? It is all poisonous."

The purism evident in those little patches is part of what makes Mansfield's own fiction special, for me. Her better stories plunge the reader into scenes with startling immediacy, and with a delicious sensibility that feels subversive and irresistible at the same time. She owes a debt to Chekhov, but even so there is no one like her. When she wrote out of love (rather than in satire, sarcasm, or commerce), she is magnificent and, IMO, deeply rewarding. I am thinking of her two "novels," by which I mean the longest of the stories, "Prelude" and "At the Bay."

Katherine Mansfield and her longtime fiancé John Middleton Murry (eventually they married) were close friends with D.H. Lawrence and his mistress Frieda. The four of them tried to live together or close by several times, but the intensities unleashed destroyed the experiments each time. Katherine is the model for Gudrun in Women in Love.

I am going to add to this review, but have lost one version of it already so I am signing off for the moment. (And now I just lost a second update with edits. Strange! So these little edits I am herewith adding complete my job.) Anyone who thinks the development of the birth-control pill created an entirely new sexual revolution will learn from Katherine's life that sexual adventurousness was a very possible choice pre-pill, despite the higher stakes involved.

[Victoria Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melancholy, but exquisite, "Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View" by Jeffrey Meyers gave me a painful look into the existence of a brilliant writer who died too soon. Using her life for material she was immediately recognized as a talent at an early age. A contemporary of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf the way Meyers describes her is both loving and accurate. After reading one of her quotes on goodreads.com I became fascinated by her and wanted to learn how she became such a prolific writer, so I checked this book out of the library.
Originally from New Zealand Kathleen Beauchamp nee Katherine Mansfield (1908-1923) gracefully transformed her early childhood there and later life in England and elsewhere into her stories. A restless traveler and staunch bohemian I was heartbroken to discover that her many struggles with money, health issues and general self-destruction led to her misery.
Still she wrote, lived fearlessly and left her mark on me as a writer, reader of fiction and contemporary woman. Despite the slow pace and drawn out tragedy of his account I will always be indebted to Jeffrey Meyers for this respectful introduction.

[Mills College Library]

811.52 W566c 1983

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Waver between awe and frustration and then amazement at how her life finally ended. Disgust for her husband, pity for her friend. A painful biography.