Katherine Mansfield and the New Age School of Satire

I want to tell you how sensible I am of your wonderful unfailing kindness to me in the "old days." And to thank you for all you let me learn from you. I am still—more shame to me—very low down in the school. But you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do.

—Katherine Mansfield, letter to New Age editor A. R. Orage, February 9, 1921

In representing herself as "low down" in A. R. Orage's school, Katherine Mansfield acknowledges a multifaceted debt to a significant broker of modern literary prestige.¹ Scholars have long recognized the importance of Mansfield's New Age period (1910-1912) to the artist's development, yet have effectively followed the author's lead in dismissing her writings from this venue as crudely satirical and juvenile.² In neglecting this earlier work, scholars have failed to recognize the full import of Mansfield's matriculation in the New Age school: her mentors, A. R. Orage and Beatrice Hastings, not only encouraged Mansfield to cultivate a sparse and sardonic style, but also taught her the power of parody and satire to create a place for herself in a sometimes hostile literary world. Despite the modernist-perpetuated myth that the movement was antithetical to pressures of the marketplace, modernists were often highly "canny about fashioning their careers,"³ as a flourishing new field of scholarship has shown. Early Mansfield is particularly due for reconsideration in this regard, for, far from being typically regarded as a savvy self-promoter, she has too often been perceived as a literary changeling, dutifully tailoring her style to fit the "editorial call" of first The New Age, then John Middleton Murry's rival little magazine, Rhythm.⁴ To counter what I term the "chameleon reading," I want to install a very different image of this colonial writer—as a shrewd negotiator of England's literary marketplace.

It was a significant feat for twenty-one-year-old Mansfield, who had emigrated from New Zealand just a year and a half before, to get the first of her "Bavarian sketches" published in The New Age on February 24, 1910.⁵ An influential London magazine with a wide and distinguished readership, The New Age has increasingly been recognized for its contribution to the cultural ferment that produced modernism.⁶ Described by Wallace Martin as "an unparalleled arena of cultural and political debate" that encouraged a "vital relationship between experimentation and literary tradition," the journal included among its contributors established literary celebrities such as H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett, along with the then unknown Mansfield, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound.⁷ Publishing in The New Age meant that Mansfield had impressed Orage, the journal's formidable literary editor and widely hailed discoverer of new talent—a connection that would yield both a regular venue for her work (starting with, in the next six months, the nine stories that formed the core of her first collection, In a German Pension) and access to the talented and dynamic New Age circle. Mansfield's membership in this group went beyond participating in the now legendary meetings to debate art and politics in the basement of the ABC Teashop; it extended to her sharing lodgings for several months with Orage and his then mistress Hastings, one of the journal's core contributors. During this two-year apprenticeship, Mansfield began to cultivate not only certain trademarks of her style, but also useful strategies for positioning herself within England's literary culture.

A crucial phase of this apprenticeship consisted of collaborating with Hastings on a collection of parodies of bestselling authors, including those now familiar modernist whipping boys, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, for the May 25, 1911, issue of The New Age. Here Mansfield joined forces with her mentor to playfully mock not just the writings of some of the journal's most heavyweight contributors, but equally the writers themselves. Like the parodies of Ezra Pound's pompous translations that Hastings would write...