KATHERINE MANSFIELD THIRD ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION

 The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce the winner of its third international essay prize competition, on the theme of ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic’. The judges, Professor Susan Sellers and Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts, chaired by Professor Gina Wisker, were unanimous in their view that one of the essays submitted was outstanding in the originality of its approach and in the subtlety of its expression.

The winner is Maria Casado Villanueva’s essay ‘The Little Red Governess: Mansfield and the Demythologisation of the Motif of “Little Red Riding Hood” in “The Little Governess”’.

The essay explores the ways in which Mansfield deploys the fairy tale motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in her story ‘The Little Governess’, showing how – as with the fairy tale – it operates as a socialising agent, a perpetuator of gender notions, and how through a modernist game of perspectives Mansfield articulates a criticism of a model of education, which both relegates women to a state of undesirable naïveté and punishes them for their own gullibility. Maria Casado Villanueva, a PhD candidate at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, will receive a prize of NZ$390 (£200), and her essay will appear in the journal Katherine Mansfield Studies (Volume 4), to be published in October 2012 by Edinburgh University Press (sent free to all members of the Katherine Mansfield Society).