Katherine Mansfield in abundance

There are presenly three reminders of the great short story writer on my desk.

One is the most recent issue of The Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society published by the Edinburgh University Press (the 220 page journal is free to members of the Society) and starts with a Foreword by the Honorary Vice-President of the Society, C.K.Stead.

The second is last Saturday's issue of Canvas magazine (NZ Herald) which contains C.K.Stead's review of Katherine Mansfield The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones while the third is a recently published novel by US writer Joanna

Fitzpatrick, In Pursuit, a fictionalised biography of KM dealing especially with her latter years in France. It is an absorbing, haunting, and of course inevitably sad story of her volatile relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry and her lifelong companion and caregiver Ida Baker.

Here for those outside the New Zealand Herald's circulation area is C.K.Stead's review from last Saturday:

Katherine Mansfield The Story-Teller by Kathleen Jones - Penguin/Viking, $65

This the first full biography written since the publication of the two-volume edition of Mansfield's Notebooks (2002), transcribed by Margaret Scott, and the final (fifth) volume in 2008 of her Collected Letters, edited by Scott and Vincent O'Sullivan.

It also draws on all the previous scholarly work, including especially biographers Anthony Alpers and Claire Tomalin, and further back the work of Ruth Mantz, Mansfield's friend Ida Baker, and her husband and first editor, John Middleton Murry. A huge amount of the work had been done, but much of it was scattered. What was needed was diligence in pulling it all together, and Kathleen Jones has been diligent.

She has a problem, however. Like every Mansfield scholar, she faces the question of what to do about Murry, and Murry's subsequent families who lived, in one way or another, in Mansfield's shadow and with her ghost. Four of these (Murry himself, his son Colin and daughter Katherine to his second wife, and his fourth wife Mary) all wrote personal memoirs.
Colin and Katherine suffered life-long consequences of being, so to speak, inheritors of the Mansfield legend, or the Mansfield curse.

So, no doubt, did the two children of Murry's third marriage; but one of these died young and the other has remained silent. Murry's second marriage, to Violet le Maistre, who modelled herself on Mansfield, wrote similar short stories and died young of tuberculosis, is like a bad dream. His third marriage, to an extremely jealous, angry and violent woman, Betty Cockbayne, was a nightmare. After all of that the fourth marriage had to be idyllic, if only because it was peaceful; and that - idyllic - is how he and Mary both represented it.

This, then, is the scope of the present book's material - not only the 34 years from Mansfield's birth until her death in 1923, but (with strange mathematical symmetry) a further 34 until Murry's death in 1957. It is, therefore, quite wrongly named. Insofar as its subject is Mansfield, it is about her not only as "story-teller" but as ghost. It is about a figure who meant no harm to those who came after, but who was sufficiently a force to be an occasional blessing and a frequent curse in their lives.

Murry she made prosperous but left him obsessed. She also made him publicly conspicuous. Without her in his life it's likely he would have been quickly forgotten, and the records he kept of his own life forgotten too. As the beneficiary and promoter of her literary remains, however, he has been exposed in all his ghastly well-meaning duplicity, weakness, woolly idealism and self-deception.
Read the rest of Stead's thoughtful review at  NZ Herald.