Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (review)

Once on the fringes of modernist studies as a female short-story writer from New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield has, in the past two decades, drifted steadily toward the center of both curricula and critical debate. Literary scholars and biographers have yielded a range of new perspectives on this author, as modernist, feminist, nationalist, lesbian. To this gallery, Jenny McDonnell adds another compelling portrait: Mansfield as "shrewd author at work within the literary marketplace" (173). This view provides a welcome revision of a persistent misperception of Mansfield as a literary damsel in distress, beholden to male mentors and editors—above all, to John Middleton Murry, her husband and literary executor, who played no small role in fashioning this image of his late wife. In the first study to systematically examine the ways that Mansfield's writing was shaped by its diverse publishing contexts, McDonnell argues persuasively for the view of Mansfield as a savvy professional writer, one who successfully negotiated a complex and commercially viable modernist aesthetic.

McDonnell traces the arc of Mansfield's oeuvre from her earliest publications in coterie magazines like Rhythm to her latest in popular venues like The Sphere, illuminating the bibliographic codes of a wide range of periodicals and showing how Mansfield's writing was forged in relation to these codes. Building on Lawrence Rainey's notion that modernism was shaped by a "social reality"—a "configuration of agents and practices that converge in the production, marketing, and publication of an idiom"¹—McDonnell examines Mansfield's relationships with editors, publishers, and different reading publics, "demonstrating the ways in which literary texts can dramatise and also bear the scars of the societal and intellectual processes" that Rainey describes (McDonnell 6). McDonnell argues that Mansfield's fiction allegorizes the uneasiness the author felt throughout her career about the loss of control over both the production of her writing (its composition and editing) and its consumption by different reading publics—an uneasiness McDonnell dubs Mansfield's "anxiety of authority" (6). McDonnell documents Mansfield's shift from the elitist ideology of coterie publication toward the seemingly more democratic attempt to reach a wider audience, and her (somewhat anxious) attempt to fuse literary and popular aspirations.

By showing that Mansfield's technical innovations are significantly informed by her attempts to negotiate a relationship with an ever-widening literary public, McDonnell contributes to recent scholarship that complicates the tenacious binaries of high and low, art and commerce, elite and mass culture. Moreover, the willingness to traverse these categories enables one of McDonnell's most important contributions to Mansfield studies: her examination of Mansfield's neglected Athenaeum reviews and her Sphere stories, both of which have been dismissed as hackwork, peripheral to Mansfield's important literary output as a modernist. By reframing Mansfield as a professional writer (rather than a coterie artist sheltered from the marketplace), McDonnell is able to see both her journalism and her popular magazine fiction as crucial to the development of Mansfield's aesthetic and to her evolving sense of her authority as a writer.

McDonnell's tour of the publication contexts for Mansfield's work begins with a consideration of A. R. Orage's The New Age, a lively magazine of politics, literature, and the arts, which, as several recent studies have shown, played a significant role in the emergence of modernism. Mansfield scholars have traditionally dismissed the author's New Age writings (1910-11) as immature, but McDonnell makes a case for their importance in Mansfield's professional development, arguing that up to a point, the journal promoted Mansfield's experimentation in form, publishing her work in a range of genres including short fiction, poetry, prose poems, travelogues, parodies, and letters to the editor. Ultimately, though, McDonnell argues that The New Age favored aesthetic innovation "in theory rather than practice" (44), and its refusal to accommodate Mansfield's more experimental writing pushed the author to seek new venues in which to develop her craft.

McDonnell...