A fresh look at Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera Notebook

The Urewera Notebook  

By Katherine Mansfield

Edited by Anna Plumridge

Release Date: June 2015

Hardback, 20 B&W photos

ISBN 978-1-927322-03-1, 

Otago University Press,

$49.95

Katherine Mansfield’s camping tour of the central North Island in 1907 had an enduring impact on her life and writing, introducing her to aspects of the country she had never experienced before, and coming at a uniquely formative period in her life.

The newly transcribed edition The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield, edited by Anna Plumridge, illuminates the context of the camping tour and Mansfield’s idiosyncratic response to all she encountered.

After three years in London, attending Queen’s College and travelling in continental Europe, KM came back to New Zealand in 1906. It was a brief last encounter with the country of her birth: she left again in 1908, never to return.

‘The Urewera Notebook,’ says editor Anna Plumridge, ‘is the only sustained piece of writing by Mansfield where she explores and writes about New Zealand while living in New Zealand.

‘Uniquely, the notebook reveals Mansfield’s attitudes to New Zealand, not in adulthood when memory is tempered by time or in fiction where memory is reworked through the act of writing, but as a 19-year-old living in the colony.’

This edition includes photographs previously unpublished, and new historical material from descendants of people who met Mansfield en route and descendants of her travelling companions. A collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of earlier editors adds further to the richness of this accessible yet scholarly edition.

The journey itself is recreated for the reader with a detailed timeline and itinerary. The introductory essay illuminates the historical context and teases out the ambiguity of Mansfield’s response both to the Māori people she met and to the environment: on the one hand romanticised and yet also seen with a clarity and directness.

‘Mansfield carried much of her “reportage” of the landscape forward into “The Woman at the Store” (1912), and even descriptions of the landscape in “At the Bay” (1922) owes something to the “Urewera Notebook”,’ says Anna.

The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield edited by Anna Plumridge enables us to participate in Mansfield’s journey as never before.

This is a most attractive and important piece of New Zealand publishing, my congratulations to the author and publisher.

Anna Plumridge is a postgraduate student at Victoria University of Wellington. She has a particular interest in Modernist literature, the literature of Empire and paleography. Anna tutors in New Zealand literature and editing manuscripts as part of a project on The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing .www.otago.ac.nz/press Link to Radio New Zealand interview with Anna Plumridge - http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/standing-room-only/audio/201755624/katherine-mansfield%27s-urewera-notebook