C.K.Stead writes - London Review of Books - issue 3 March 2011

C.K. Stead has a piece in the current London Review of Books (3 March 2011, ‘War of the Wasps’) in which he uses the recently published two-volume T.S. Eliot early letters (Faber), and the fifth and final volume of the Katherine Mansfield letters (Oxford), to trace the tangled interrelationships not only of Mansfield and Eliot but also of their respective spouses, Vivien Eliot and John Middleton Murry.

Stead also cites Eliot’s published critical essays with their references first to Murry, and later, after her death, to Mansfield. The piece reveals Eliot in particular as anxious (apparently without grounds) that Mansfield was damaging his reputation with his sponsor, Lady Rothermere. This agitates Vivien who writes to Ezra Pound that Mansfield has been ‘dancing naked’ with Lady Rothermere at the Gurdjeff Institute in Fontainebleau while ‘pouring poison into her ear about Tom’; and Pound responds, uncharacteristically trying to calm things.


What emerges is a sort of love-hate relationship all round, full of complexities and innuendos. Stead implies rather than asserts a good deal, and leaves the reader free to conclude or to speculate. It’s a fascinating glimpse inside those famous lives, with Mansfield appearing on the whole the sanest of a weird bunch.