Mansfield and Murry

31:1, Book Reviews Hudson liked the physical appearance of American editions of his books, and Dr. Ronner's volume with its pleasant green cloth binding and clean-cut, easy to read type-face surely would have met with his approval. However, one regrets the relegation of textual notes to the back of the book instead of being more conveniently placed at the bottoms of relevant pages; also that the index— confined mainly to publication titles and names of persons and organisations— is not more extensive. Dennis Shrubsall Punster, Somerset, England MANSFIELD AND MURRY TAe Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume Two: 1918-1919. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan with Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. £17.50 Lakshmi Raj Sharma. In Defence of J. Middleton Murry. Dikshit Publishing, India, 1986. Katherine Mansfield's life changed poignantly and dramatically during 1918 and 1919, the years covered by the second volume of TAe Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. The first letters here are written from Paris, where Mansfield is enroute to the South of France, her spirits buoyed, despite the difficulties of the journey, by her belief that replacing English winter with Mediterranean sunshine will restore her health and her capacity to work uninterruptedly at her writing. The emotional distance she travelled in the succeeding twenty months is measured by the final letter of this volume, an informal will addressed to her husband John Middleton Murry, written "in case I should pop off suddenly," which she put in the hands of her banker when she left England in September 1919. Murry was given the letter after she died of tuberculosis in January 1923. The story of her final wandering years is to be told in subsequent volumes of this series. In Volume Two, Mansfield's gradual discovery of the probability of her early death dominates. A few weeks after she arrived in Bandol and found it nothing like the remembered paradise she had shared with Murry in 1916, she experienced her first hemorrhage. The hardship of the return to England three months later, during which she was stranded for weeks in Paris while it was under German bombardment, further entrenched her disease. Although she and Murry were finally able to marry (her divorce decree having been granted), life together was postponed until she recuperated. She was a lonely bride. The Murrys enjoyed just one year of settled domestic life. During this interval World War I ended, and Murry became editor of the Athenaeum, which he transformed into the premier British literary publication of the time. In the same period Mansfield's "Prelude" was published by the Woolf s Hogarth Press, 103 31:1, Book Reviews she became a regular and incisive reviewer for her husband's journal, and her friendship with two of the most memorable women of her day—Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morrell—intensified. But growing social prestige and artistic recognition were overshadowed by her constant battle with pain and weakness, a struggle not aided by the bizarre programs which the specialists she consulted variously and confusingly recommended. The electrotherapy and injections produced high fever. Although two doctors told her that she could expect to live four years, at the most, if she did not consent to lead an utterly disciplined life in a sanatorium, her favorite physician, Sorapure, decided that she would be hurt most by being kept from her writing, and it was his advice, of course, which she followed. Despite illness and loneliness, Mansfield wrote two intense short stories at Bandol, "Je ne parle pas français" and "Bliss." Dissatisfied with all she had yet done—"Everything that I've written before seems more or less a false alarm," she declared to S. S. Koteliansky—Mansfield desired profoundly to develop a new prose medium, to move in "hidden country." In that her aim was like Virginia Woolf's, to whom she wrote: "I feel an intense joy that you are a writer—that you live for writing. . . . You are immensely important in my world, Virginia." Of other contemporary writers, however, she was skeptical or openly contemptuous. Although Katherine Mansfield clearly saw that one could not retreat to the genteel mediocrities of the Georgians (she called a new...