In the bleary dawn of the new year, I’ve been reading the short stories and journal of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). This month is the centenary of her death. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, Mansfield died in Switzerland of a haemorrhage on 9 January 1923, aged 34. Part of the modernist literary movement, Mansfield’s crystalline writing combines satire and pathos; her characters are often both ridiculous and sympathetic.
Miss Brill (1920)
Every Sunday, Miss Brill goes to the public gardens to hear the band play. That day she takes out her treasured fox fur. It’s a little battered but still a ‘dear old thing’, a ‘Little rogue biting its tail by her left ear.’ Miss Brill loves to people-watch, taking in the variety of life on display in the park. She thinks it is ‘exactly like a play […] Even she had a part and came every Sunday […] she was part of the performance after all.’
Despite Miss Brill’s apparent cheer, a bleakness seeps into the scene. An older woman in an ermine toque, ‘bought when her hair was yellow’, is disregarded by the gentleman she greets. He lights his cigarette and blows smoke in her face. Of other spectators on benches and chairs, Miss Brill thinks: ‘They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even - even cupboards!’
Miss Brill is not the only observer. She too is observed. Not kindly. Seated nearby, she overhears a young couple call her ‘a stupid old thing’. The girl points out her ‘funny’ fur, that looks ‘exactly like a fried whiting.’ Miss Brill returns home, cast out of the occasion. She doesn’t buy her usual slice of honey cake from the bakery, but goes straight up to ‘her room like a cupboard.’
The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
The story’s quiet melancholy and Miss Brill’s disassociation from herself has always stuck with me. Mansfield expresses her spare and isolated life so well: the careful routines that stave off sadness, the destabilising cuts of careless comments, and the role of the fox fur as a companion and manifestation of its owner. The friendliness of objects becomes vital amidst the unfriendliness of other people. A failed flâneuse, viewed through cold eyes, Miss Brill is reduced to a fusty object in a cupboard. Her loneliness is so acute that even her emotions are estranged from her body. At the end of the story, she does not cry. Her tears are not her own. They come from the treated remains of a dead wild animal.
Mansfield’s Journal and The Aloe
Considering the precise observations and psychological insight of ‘Miss Brill’, it’s unsurprising that Mansfield kept diaries and other scraps of personal writing that fed into her stories. After her death, her husband John Middleton Murry compiled dispersed fragments and unposted letters into a Journal, first published in 1927. It is made up of pensive moments, character sketches, homesickness, memories, illness, and incisive comments on other authors (E.M. Forster ‘never gets any further than warming the teapot’). Entries change from the first person to the third. Some passages are rewritten due to unpursued plans to publish a ‘minute notebook’. Reading it is a shifting and dream-like experience (Mansfield often records her dreams; one of her images of heaven is a late evening chat with Chekhov). I love many of her turns of phrase: ‘I feel like a cat among tigers’ or ‘It takes a dreadful number of toadstools to make you realise that life is not one long mushroom’.
A powerful portion of the Journal reveals the effect of Mansfield’s nostalgia for her Aotearoa New Zealand childhood on her writing, and her grief at the loss of her younger brother Leslie in World War One. After joining up, Leslie visited his sister in London before joining his regiment. Although Mansfield had an ambivalent relationship with her birthplace, which she left for Europe at age 20, their reminiscences inspired her to write about it. Leslie’s accidental death during a grenade demonstration in Belgium in October 1915 sealed this promise with tragedy, sharpening the need to evoke ‘that lovely time when we were both alive’. One of his fellow soldiers wrote to Mansfield enclosing a piece of moss growing beside his grave. Her expressions of grief in the Journal are extremely moving, describing visions of Leslie: ‘I woke and was he, for quite a long time. I felt my face was his serious, sleepy face.’
Drawing on her memories, Mansfield wrote The Aloe, which she would turn into Prelude, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1917. She sketches out her objectives in the Journal, directly addressing her brother about writing ‘a long kind of elegy to you […] in a kind of special prose.’
Now — now I want to write recollections of my own country. Yes, I want to write about my own country till I simply exhaust my store. Not only because it is a “sacred debt” that I pay to my country because my brother and I were born there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places. I am never far away from them. I long to renew them in writing. […] But all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an afterglow […]
Most of Mansfield’s writing about New Zealand is set in the affluent bourgeois households of a settler society in an expanding Wellington, built after the appropriation of Māori lands through the Port Nicholson Block Deed of Purchase in 1839. The Aloe follows the Burnells’ move from Wellington to a new house in the countryside. It floats among the family’s consciousnesses, particularly the child Kezia, curious and imaginative, her restive aunt Beryl, struggling with her ‘false self’, and aloof mother Linda, realising she partially hates her husband.
Sentences are infused with Mansfield’s desired luminosity of remembrance. When Kezia first sees the house at night, she writes: ‘Over its roofs, the verandah poles, the window sashes, the moon swung her lantern.’ Then her beloved grandmother Mrs. Fairfield emerges to greet them with ‘a little lamp’. Mrs. Fairfield also owns a distinctive brooch of ‘a crescent moon with five little owls seated on it.’ The repeated lunar imagery enhances the poignant sense of ‘an afterglow’, the sense Mansfield had of her birthplace as a lost place: ‘you, my little sun of it, are set. You have dropped over the dazzling brim of the world.’
Mansfield is so good at evoking the lush impressionism of certain childhood experiences, when adult manoeuvres are faintly mystifying and nature feels close. Somehow Mansfield is able to inhabit a child’s mind without it feeling forced or embarassing. Exploring the garden, Kezia finds tangles of flowers:
The camellia trees were in flower, white and crimson and pink and white striped with flashing leaves — you could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. All kinds of roses — gentlemen’s button hole roses, little white ones but far too full of insects to put under anyone’s nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals around the bushes, cabbage roses on thick fat stalks, moss roses, always in bud […]
This sense of vividness is also found in a conversation between Mansfield and Leslie in London before his death, recorded in the Journal. It reads almost like a short story. While the pair are walking up and down Acacia Road, ‘a little old pear, hard as a stone’ falls from a tree. This familiar sound provokes reminiscences of the abundance of ‘bright, canary yellow’ pears in their Edenic childhood home. They plan to travel back there together. Mansfield remarks: ‘You know I shall always be a stranger here’, and Leslie tells her he feels confident he’ll return from the war: ‘I feel it’s as certain as this pear.’ The scene ends with Leslie suddenly saying goodbye. Once again, the moon is present, the silver light of memory.
Together The Aloe and the Journal seem to reflect a philosophy that Mansfield described in a letter to a friend in 1922. It encapsulates why her writing about loss, longing and outsiders feels so astute and alive, humming with intensity:
I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw on one’s real familiar life — to find the treasure in that … And the curious thing is that if we describe this which seems to us so intensely personal, other people take it to themselves and understand it as if it were their own.
If you want to read more:
Kirsty Gunn writes for Lit Hub about growing up in the same area of Wellington as Mansfield, and how her works are entwined with memories of her mother:
Details of personal history are caught up and captured in the texts and pages and screens before us, and they become part of the story, part of who we are. Like the shadows cast upon the lawns and gardens of Mansfield’s stories, reminding us, as her stories always do, that presence and absence go together.
Aimée Gasston explores Mansfield’s life and work through food for the Public Domain Review:
Mansfield wrote poems about food in her notebooks, as well as recipes and grocery lists, and would interrupt her prose with famished declarations such as: “Im so hungry, simply empty, and seeing in my minds eye just now a surloin of beef, well browned and with plenty of gravy and horseradish sauce and baked potatoes I nearly sobbed”
Following the student protests of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, modernist writers like Mansfield and Virginia Woolf inspired young literati in China during the 20s and 30s. Xu Zhimo, a poet involved in the Crescent Moon Society (who studied at Cambridge for a time), met Mansfield in London for what he described as ‘twenty immortal minutes’, and translated her work into Chinese.
Woolf corresponded with another Crescent Moon writer, Ling Shuhua, sometimes designated the ‘Chinese Katherine Mansfield’. Her memoir Ancient Melodies was published by the Hogarth Press in 1953. In a couple of articles from the British Library, Prof. Patricia Laurence highlights some of the details of this literary relationship, and the fascinating cross-cultural exchange between the Crescent Moon and Bloomsbury sets:
Placing these works by Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua as well as their literary homes, the Bloomsbury and Crescent Moon Groups, side by side, reveals not ‘influence’ – an overworked category in literary studies – but rather shared affinities. It also brings into relief the pre-existing cultural need in England and China in the 1920s and 1930s for an aesthetic vision during a time of political and social ferment in both countries.
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