The Explosion of Mansfield Studies

Surveying the number of recent publications with 'Katherine Mansfield' in their titles, it seems that Mansfield studies is currently undergoing the same explosion of critical attention and activity that has already happened to other female modernist writers: Virginia Woolf in the 1970s, Rebecca West in the 1980s, and H.D. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to name but a few. Mansfield is clearly not an author being discovered for the first time - there is already an established critical canon by scholars including Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Angela Smith, and others, as well as a number of biographies to date - but what Mansfield studies can perhaps claim as its own is the intense energy and speed with which the critical discipline is currently expanding, led by a group of committed enthusiasts focused under the auspices of the recently formed Katherine Mansfield Society. As the editors of Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism point out, the 'resurgence of interest in Mansfield' and 'renewed scholarly activity' (pp. iii-ix) include four conferences and colloquia focused solely on Mansfield (London 2008, Menton 2009, Melbourne 2010, and Cambridge 2011, with a further conference planned in Slovakia for 2012); a new dedicated author-based scholarly journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press; and the inauguration of various regular events, including an annual essay prize and birthday lecture.

The much-anticipated final volume of Mansfield's letters, edited by O'Sullivan and Scott, arrived in 2008, and more recent critical texts have included Jenny McDonnell's study of the material conditions of Mansfield's storytelling in Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public, Faith Binckes's book-length study of Mansfield in the magazines, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading 'Rhythm', 1910-1914, and Sydney Janet Kaplan's study of influence in Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (all 2010).¹ The year 2010 also saw the UK publication of Kathleen Jones's new biography, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller. The present volume is one of two collections of essays published in 2011, the other being Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, also edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson. Within the landscape of ever-decreasing and impact-assessed funding for the humanities, this dramatic increase in Mansfield's 'stage time' in the higher education performance arena through high-level research activity and regular colloquia is an admirable drawing together of collective scholarly energy.

This is precisely what is needed for the more definitive inclusion of Mansfield within the modernist canon. Elizabeth Bowen famously referred to her as 'our missing contemporary' in her 1957 introduction to Mansfield's stories, but her inscription still remains contested. (The 2010 Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, for example, makes scant reference to Mansfield.) Establishing Mansfield within modernism is evidently part of the editors' purpose, as they suggest that 'the new interpretations of Mansfield's work offered in this volume will expand understanding of her place in modernism for scholars, students and the general reader alike' (p. iii). The series editors' preface similarly aims to emphasise 'the centrality of supposedly "minor" or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing'. These essays are a collective means of exploring the rich and varied modes Mansfield used to develop her modernist technique.

The sixteen papers collected in this volume are from the first conference focused solely on Mansfield, held at Birkbeck College, London, in 2008. With all conference proceedings there is a danger of contributions being too disparate, reading as embryonic conference papers rather than developed arguments. Thankfully, this is not the case here. This series of engaging and original essays provides new and interesting ways of reading Mansfield, including a number of articles focusing on previously neglected (or undiscovered) sources, including Mansfield's periodical publications, journals, and literary and visual influences. This accords with the...