KATHERINE MANSFIELD
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Katherine Mansfield by Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
aka: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry
Dates: 1888-1923
Nationality: New Zealander
Literary Periods:
Inter-War Period, 1918-1939
Modernist Period, 1899-1945
Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
Literary Movements:
Modernism c.1899-1945
Postcolonialism, 20th Century
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Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park - Plaques for the memorial by David Nind, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Series [Database]
Essays on the life and works of Katherine Mansfield, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
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A Katherine Mansfield Chronology (2008) by
This new addition to the Author Chronologies series details the tumultuous and tragic life of Katherine Mansfield (she died from tuberculosis aged only thirty-four) and sheds new light on her approach and attitudes to writing.
Call Number: Bates PR9639.3.M258 Z856 2008ISBN: 0230525598
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Find books, essays and journal articles in MLA International Bibliography 
[Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative scholarship on Katherine Mansfield from books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers.
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Modernist Short Fiction by Women (2011) by
Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.
Call Number: Miller PR116 .D74 2011ISBN: 9780754666462
Circulating genius : John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence (2010) by
The relationship between the personal lives of writers and the works they produce is at the heart of this intriguing new study. In particular, it reconsiders the place of John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) in the development of literary modernism in Britain. Drawing on Murry's unpublished journals and long-forgotten novels, Circulating Genius examines his significance as a 'circulator' of ideas, reputations and critical positions in his roles of editor, literary critic, novelist, friend and lover and complicates the arguments of earlier biographers and critics about his relationships - both personal and professional - with Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence.
Call Number: Miller PR6025.U8 Z735 2010ISBN: 9780748641482
Alone! alone! : lives of some outsider women (2004) by Call Number: Miller CT3203 .D57 2004ISBN: 1590170695See Chapter "An Ice-Cold Wreath: Katherine Mansfield"
In the presence of audience : the self in diaries and fiction (2003) by Call Number: Miller PR908 .M37 2003ISBN: 0814209521See Chapter "Katherine Mansfield: 'Damning Little Notebooks Tell Their Own Story'"
Radical Mansfield : double discourse in Katherine Mansfield's short stories (1997) by Call Number: Bowdoin PR9639.3.M258 Z6354 1997ISBN: 0312174675
Literature and Homosexuality (2000) by Call Number: Miller PN56.H57 L568 2000ISBN: 9042005297See Essay "Lesbian Overtones in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories"
Katherine Mansfield : a literary life (2000) by
In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence 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 Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.
Call Number: Bates & Bowdoin PR9639.3.M258 Z877 2000ISBN: 0333618777
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (1999) by
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.
Call Number: Bates PR9639.3.M258 Z878 1999ISBN: 0198183984
Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (1999) by
Taking an innovative approach to criticism, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form demonstrates how Mansfield's stylistic practice both embodies and conveys her analysis of social and psychological trauma through a "metaphoric" use of literary form. New argues that the stories are neither simple vehicles for conveying emotional states nor neutral representations of moments in time but carefully crafted models, or correlatives, of social and psychological conditions of understanding. He elucidates a number of formal strategies, such as sequence, reversal, negation, repetition, deferral, and reconstruction, and then applies them to a wide range of Mansfield's stories, including such favorites as "Prelude," "The Voyage," "The Little Governess," and "Je ne parle pas français." Drawing on a range of writings in contemporary postcolonial, narratological, and gender theory, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form leads to a new appreciation of the implications of Mansfield's formal craft. The book, written in a lively and readily accessible style, is at once an exemplary demonstration of the intricate process of critical reading and an intelligent and innovative reassessment of Mansfield's literary significance.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9780773517912
Women's Fiction and the Great War (1997) by Call Number: Miller PR888.W65 W66 1997ISBN: 0198182783See essay "Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield"
The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (1996) by
The appeal of Katherine Mansfield's work knows no geographical boundaries. All of her writings remain in print, she is widely read, taught, and anthologized throughout the world, and her work has been translated into diverse languages. The essays in this volume chart the response to Mansfield's work across time and place. Included are the earliest reviews of her writing from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as pieces exemplifying modern critical approaches to her work. 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.
Call Number: Bates PR9639.3.M258 Z623 1996ISBN: 0313290644
Word of Mouth (1996) by
Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self consciousness about their status as women writers. At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are pattens of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself. Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment.
Call Number: Bates & Bowdoin PR9639.3.M258 Z844 1996ISBN: 0813916755
Illness, Gender, and Writing (1994) by
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
Call Number: Miller PR9639.3.M258 Z587 1994ISBN: 0801848733
Katherine Mansfield (1994) by
"In this new edition of Katherine Mansfield, Saralyn Daly offers a timely and discerning assessment of one of the century's most gifted writers of the short story. Out of fashion with critics when the first edition was published in 1965, Mansfield has since come to be viewed as a major influence on modernist and contemporary fiction. This revived interest shows itself in various forms; a crop of critical studies, mostly from scholars in her native New Zealand; feminist interpretations of her work; and scholarly editions of her poetry, critical writing, and letters, augmented by a collection of letters between the author and her husband, editor and critic John Middleton Murry. All of these new sources, as well as Daly's close study of early drafts of Mansfield's major stories, inform this book." "Mansfield, who died from tuberculosis in 1923 at age 34, wrote often of the inadequacies of personal relationships. She sometimes used her stories to express her feelings to her husband, but his letters exhibit his failure to decode her messages; Mansfield eventually stopped writing her stories "to" or about Murry. This decision, recorded in one of her notebooks, freed her to create her finest work during the last years of her life, beginning with the stories "At the Bay," "The Garden Party," and "The Doll's House" and culminating in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "The Fly."" "Mansfield introduced most of her character types - abused children, innocent young women and isolated older women, exploited wives, and overbearing husbands - in her earliest short story collection, In a German Pensione. From the very first she wrote from what she knew; her New Zealand youth, the artistic bohemian world of London, the Continental world in which she convalesced. This choice of subject matter has led biographers to assume her fiction is a direct account of what they perceive to be an unhappy life - an impression that is false, Daly writes, and that was initiated largely by Murry, also Mansfield's literary executor. Mansfield used her memories to compose fiction, but her stories are not literal transcriptions of her experience. In theme, style, and form Mansfield persistently developed her craft. Daly describes the long, painstaking progress that would establish her leadership in short story structure." "While Mansfield's stories reflect the spiritual and artistic malaise of her age, they also represent acts of protest and social criticism. Daly's study gives the reader access to a body of work that for this very dissonance remains a cornerstone of the modernist tradition in fiction."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: Colby PR9639.3.M258 Z635 1994ISBN: 0805770569
Katherine Mansfield--in from the margin (1994) by
"Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, New Zealand, died near Paris in 1923, at the age of thirty-four. Since her death, the popular image of Mansfield has been of a short-story writer who never quite graduated to the major form of the novel. It is true that some scholars have long held that she raised the short story almost to the level of poetry, but most have viewed her as on the whole a marginal literary figure, at least as well known for her unsettled and nomadic personal life as for her literary output, which included four collections of stories published during her lifetime and one posthumous collection." "Since the observance in 1988 of the centennial of Mansfield's birth, however, a new assessment of her place in the literary firmament has begun. This collection of twelve essays, edited and introduced by Roger Robinson, seeks, as the title suggests, to bring Mansfield "in from the margin," and argues that she was in fact a writer of major stature. The essays were written by scholars from three continents, who concur in locating Mansfield as a substantial and crucial figure in twentieth-century culture. Wide-ranging in their methodologies and philosophies, the essays draw variously on previously unanalyzed biographical materials, unpublished journals and letters, fresh readings of many of Mansfield's stories, and new insights into the origins of modern culture. They show that, far from being minor or imitative, as some have contended, Mansfield helped transform the English short story, bringing to the form a new fluidity and intensity." "The first essay places Mansfield's work in the contexts of World War I and colonization, dealing with her ambivalent colonial and European identity and with images of the diseased body. The next explores her desire to maintain the innocence of youth - the cult of childhood - in her life as wall as much of her writing. Several of the pieces examine Mansfield's relationships with other women artists, including Colette and the painter Dorothy Brett, and Mansfield's treatment of women in her stories. Considerations of Mansfield's literary skills are the focus of essays that provide revealing readings of such stories as "The Escape," "Bliss," "Je ne parle pas francais," and "A Married Man's Story." Her experiences in various locales, particularly France, are the subject of three of the contributions, which include the first full assessment in English of the bohemian writer Francis Carco, her "indiscreet" Parisian lover. The concluding essay treats the final months of Mansfield's short life, when she was drawn to seek spiritual solace with the holistic philosopher George Gurdjieff." "This authoritative collection does much to bring Katherine Mansfield the sort of critical attention she has long deserved. It will be of interest to students of the twentieth-century short story, of modernism, and of writing by and about women."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: Miller PR9639.3.M258 Z733 1994ISBN: 9780807118658
Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield (1993) by Call Number: Bates PR9639.3.M258 Z62 1993ISBN: 0816188688
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991) by Call Number: Miller PR9639.3.M258 Z73 1991ISBN: 0801423287
Fictions of the female self : Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield (1991) by
Women's novels have traditionally been read as 'subjective'. Through an examination of three generations of women's fiction in the post-Romantic period, this book challenges traditional readings of women's novels and argues that fiction writing for women has often been a matter of self-erasure rather than self-inscription. In particular, it examines the changing strategies, sometimes collusive and sometimes rebellious, which Charlotte Bronte, Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield employed in their tentative project of inscribing female subjectivity into the novel and story form.
Call Number: Bates PR830.W6 P37 1991ISBN: 9780333523155
PRIMARY SOURCES: DOCUMENTS
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984) by Call Number: Miller PR9639.3.M258 Z48 1984 v.1 -v. 5ISBN: 0198126131
Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (2002) by
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) published three collections of short stories -- In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party -- during her tragically short life, 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.
Call Number: Miller PR9639.3.M258 A6 2002aISBN: 0816642354
The scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield by Call Number: Colby PR9639.3.M258 S35 1940
The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield (1983) by Call Number: Colby PR6025.U8 Z49 1983ISBN: 9780531098011
The letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield: A selection by Call Number: Colby PR9639.3.M258 Z48 1977ISBN: 0713910690
