Coming in from the Margins: Reappraising and Recentering Katherine Mansfield

If the volumes under review in this essay are any indication, Katherine Mansfield is finally poised to receive the critical recognition and celebration that she has for so long been denied. Although her short stories have never lacked for readers since her untimely death from tuberculosis in January 1923, they have rarely been accorded the same praise as similar pieces by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, her small body of writing has frequently been regarded as peripheral to modernism altogether. As early as 1922, Wyndham Lewis could dismiss Mansfield as “the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer,” someone who produced formulaic stories for an uncritical and ephemeral segment of the literary marketplace.¹ As recently as 1999, Michael Levenson could leave out any mention of her in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism.

Part of this neglect and dismissal can be traced to the smallness of her oeuvre and the scattered nature of its original publication. Much of it can also be traced to the role her husband, writer and editor John Middleton Murry, played in shaping her legacy after her death. For most of her career, Mansfield lacked a signature collection of stories on which she might stake a claim to being one of the great fiction writers of her age. Between 1911, when she published her first collection of stories, In a German Pension, a volume she understandably sought to distance herself from as she grew and developed as a writer, and 1920, when she released Bliss and other Stories, Mansfield was largely hidden from public view. Her work appeared exclusively in periodicals such as The New Age, Rhythm, and The Blue Review and in expensive, hand-printed volumes of 300 copies or less, such as the 1918 Hogarth Press edition of her experimental short story “Prelude.” As a consequence, only the most devoted readers of periodical short fiction would have been aware of the part she was playing in revolutionizing fiction writing during this period, and it was not until 1920 that she had any opportunity to be perceived by a wider public as a modernist innovator. What is more, once she did succeed in making a name for herself, illness to a great extent prevented her from capitalizing on her new-found fame or bringing greater attention to her formal achievements. Although Mansfield published a third collection in 1922, The Garden Party and Other Stories, and began to place individual stories in popular magazines such as the London Mercury and the illustrated Sphere, her husband Murry increasingly assumed management of her work as her health failed and, after her death, he began to promote an image of his wife that did little to endear her to her fellow modernists or their critical supporters. Ignoring the acerbic, witty side of Mansfield that had so charmed Leonard and Virginia Woolf and gave such a sharp edge to her best fiction, Murry tirelessly canonized his late wife as, in Jenny McDonnell’s words, a “saintly innocent” and produced numerous posthumous editions of her writing, both fictional and non-fictional, that were intended to illustrate her supposedly childlike sensitivity, purity, and serenity in the face of illness and impending death (169).

Fortunately, a more complete and more accurate picture of Mansfield has begun to emerge in the past few decades. Since the publication of Sydney Janet Kaplan’s Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), scholars have begun to reassess Mansfield’s pioneering use of free indirect discourse, plotless narrative, stream-of-consciousness prose, and fragmented impressionism. With the appearance of Margaret Scott’s complete and unexpurgated two volumes of Mansfield’s Notebooks (1991), material that had previously...