Of Bliss and Blushing: Cities and Affect in Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys

This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect theory (such as work on the idea of shame) to present an original account of how, in texts such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield) and Quartet (Rhys), both writers responded, in differing ways, to the moods of the modernist spaces of the city. It also discusses the importance of their engagement with the cultural institutions of modernism in Paris, such as that of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and explores their shared connections to the French writer Francis Carco.

Beatrice Hastings in Paris

This article examines the life and work of the elusive modernist writer Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield’s sometime friend, mentor and rival. Frequently, Hastings has been misrepresented or marginalised in accounts of the period. When we turn to the writings she produced when in Paris from 1914, however, Hastings emerges as a central, noteworthy figure in the avant-garde art scene during and immediately after the ‘crisis’ years of the First World War. This article considers the autobiographical ‘Impressions of Paris’ that Hastings published from 1914 in the British periodical The New Age, the surrealist novella that she recited in 1916 at a literary and musical matinee organised by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the hospital diary composed in 1920 in which she recounts details of her turbulent love affair with Amedeo Modigliani.

‘Not a Feminist, but …’: Elizabeth von Arnim and Female Resistance

This essay explores von Arnim’s systematic representation of the ways in which her female characters encounter, come to understand, and often seek to challenge patterns of male control and suppression of girls and women. Focussing chiefly on Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), The Pastor’s Wife (1914), Expiation (1929) and Father (1931), the essay addresses male silencing of women, emotional manipulation, and various forms of sexual intimidation and violence (including marital rape), and analyses the growth of self-knowledge and resistance in von Arnim’s female protagonists. Although von Arnim’s characters show little, if any, awareness of the feminist debates and arguments swirling around them in the world beyond the narrow confines of their own lives, many of them eventually come to voice, and act upon, the emerging demands of the contemporary women’s movement. They may not be feminists, but. …

Introduction: Complementary Cousins

‘I would like to write one story really good enough to offer you one day’; ‘please let all the pride be mine that you are my cousin.’1 Katherine Mansfield to Elizabeth von Arnim, 1922 Elizabeth von Arnim is probably best remembered as the author of ...

‘Our own little grain of truth’

‘Our own little grain of truth’ focuses on the interaction of tragedy and comedy, including the gothic grotesque, in Katherine Mansfield’s work in the last three years of her life; it does not offer biographical interpretations of the texts covered. It considers the effect of her reading, suggesting that it provided a trigger for new directions in her writing. Her response to the novel by R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, which she reviewed for the Athenaeum and discussed in letters to John Middleton Murry, shows her imagining the dark places of psychology, when traumatic experiences lead characters to confront the unthinkable. Abjection is a motif in all the texts considered: Prowse’s A Gift of the Dusk, Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Vera. In each a character confronts what Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror as ‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed at a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’, yet each of these fictions contrives to combine comedy with the dark, tragic dimension.

After Life – Expressions of Mourning in Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield

Like many women, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim lost members of their immediate family in the Great War, and both writers worked through their loss in writing. Although their work is stylistically and thematically different, the expressions of grief in their work shares certain characteristics with other (post-)war writing. This article examines the literary responses to personal to loss in von Arnim’s novels Christine and In the Mountains, as well as Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and “The Fly” with the help of their private diaries and letters.

Poetry

‘It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself.’ Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1921) She would teach me how to apply winged eyeliner in a moving vehicle....

Digging Out Characters: Elizabeth von Arnim in Virginia

During both world wars, Elizabeth von Arnim sought sanctuary in Albemarle County, Virginia. The country house, Clover Fields, left its mark on her war novel Christine. She struggled with her own grief as she wrote of Christine’s trials. The war experience underlying the novel comes into clearer focus when compared with the writing of two contemporaries who were equally affected by the First World War, Katherine Mansfield and Vera Brittain. On her second visit to Virginia at age 73, she was again an exile, this time from home in France. As in 1917, she was angry at the American reluctance to enter the war. Preoccupied with her dog Billy, she found a perfect landlady and developed a fascination with Virginia author Amélie Rives. The resemblance of a Charlottesville man to her long-dead husband Henning evoked nostalgia for her days in Prussia and allowed her to reconcile with Henning’s ghost in a way reminiscent of Fanny Skeffington’s late equanimity.

Katherine Mansfield’s Many Forms

Review essay appraising recent critical scholarship and one novel in the field of Katherine Mansfield studies.

Short Story

Laura had been worried all day about crashing the car – the last time she’d driven Monica, she’d overtaken a cyclist on a blind rise and Monica had flinched, anticipating the crunch of a head-on collision that would ricochet the oncoming car against the Frida Kahlo mural on the concrete retaining wall. The mural was primitive, done by a midnight gang with no council mandate. Ian Curtis’s death date was up there too, and either someone continued to touch up the paint, or it had everlasting properties. Why were people in Wellington so fixated on Ian Curtis’s death? Other people had suicided subsequently. Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, Antony Bourdain. There were no retaining walls near where she lived and the hill crumbled, cascaded, little slumps of ochre rock strewing the road. There was also a sign, warning drivers about low-flying kereru, but the last time she’d biked up the hill, she saw a wood pigeon on the road, its wings iridescent green and blue, scarlet blood starbursting its head. It was the first time she’d seen one with its eyes shut....