Katherine Mansfield

tutorials, biographical notes and literary criticism

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

A Cup of Tea

December 23, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Cup of Tea was written on 11 January 1922 in the space of just ‘4-5 hours’ and was published in a popular magazine the Story-teller in May of the same year. It then appeared in the collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories compiled by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry and published in 1923.

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

The ostensible point of the story is that a rich and self-regarding woman has her complacency disturbed. On a whim, she makes what she thinks of as a charitable gesture to a destitute lower-class girl, only to discover (via her husband) that the girl has qualities that she herself does not possess.

However, there is another reading of the story buried subtly in the narrative and its dialogue. Rosemary is a rich and spoiled woman with a self-indulgent lifestyle who feels that her sudden encounter with a girl off the streets could be ‘an adventure … like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky’ – which in a sense that Rosemary would not understand, it does turn out to be.

She takes the girl back home, ushers her into her private bedroom, and undresses her (in the sense of taking off her hat and coat). She has the intention of leading her into another room for tea but does not do so. When the girl begins to cry, she puts her arm around the girl’s ‘thin, bird-like shoulders’ and promises to look after her.

When Rosemary’s husband Philip interrupts, the young girl gives what is clearly a false name (‘Smith’) and is strangely unfazed by the situation in which she finds herself: she is ‘strangely still and unafraid’. Rosemary describes their encounter in terms of procurement: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. She’s a real pick-up’.

Philip, the husband, is shocked by two things – first, by how attractive the girl is, and second by the inappropriate relationship that exists between the two women. He asks satirically if ‘Miss Smith’ will be dining with them, in which case he might be forced to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.

The surface implication of this remark is that the girl might be an unemployed shop girl who is sponging off his wealthy wife, but at a deeper level there is a suggestion that she might be a prostitute of some kind. At that time in the early twentieth century, the employment of single females in occupations such as milliner (hat maker) shop assistant, and other forms of casual jobs was regarded as loosely equivalent to prostitution. This suggestion in the story is reinforced by what happens next. Rosemary pays off the girl with three pound notes and sends her on her way.

The sting in the tale for Rosemary is that she wonders if she, for all the wealth and luxury in her life, lacks the animal magnetism possessed by the lower-class young girl which has left her husband Philip ‘bowled over’ after a single glance.

Narrative voice

The literary quality in the story comes largely from the skillful manner in which Mansfield creates a fluid narrative voice which combines an engagement with her subject, her readers, and even (to some extent) with herself as an identifiable narrator.

Technically, the story starts in third person narrative mode: ‘Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful’ – but that ‘not exactly’ establishes a conversational style and an attitude to the character. She raises questions, cancels thoughts (‘No, not Peter—Michael’) employs slang (‘a duck of a boy’) and speaks to an imaginary interlocutor (‘she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’).

It is also interesting to note that her use of fashionable exaggeration is remarkably similar to that being used today – almost a hundred years later: (‘her husband absolutely adored her … the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her’). This captures perfectly the speech mannerisms and the attitudes of the nouveau riche milieu in which the story is set.

A Cup of Tea – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Rosemary Fell is a socially poised young woman who has been married for two years to a rich and devoted husband. She shops in the fashionable and expensive part of the West-End in London. An ingratiating antiques dealer shows her a small enamelled box which she covets but asks to be put by for her.

Coming out of the shop into the rain, she is accosted by a poor young woman who asks for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees the incident as a potential adventure and invites the girl back home.

When they reach the house Rosemary takes the girl into her bedroom and relieves her of her hat and coat. The girl breaks down in tears and says she cannot go on any longer.

Rosemary gives the girl tea and sandwiches, whilst she herself smokes cigarettes. This relieves the girl, and they are about to start a conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of Rosemary’s husband Philip.

Philip takes Rosemary into an adjoining room and asks her what is going on. She explains that she is merely trying to be kind to a poor girl. But Philip points out that the girl is remarkably pretty, but the relationship not desirable.

Rosemary gives the girl some money, and she leaves, after which Rosemary asks her husband if she can have the enamel box she has seen – but what she really wants to know from him is if she is pretty or not.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Honeymoon

December 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Honeymoon was probably written in Paris and first appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum on 29 April 1922. The setting is not specified but seems to be the south of France, and the two characters in the story are ‘abroad’ which suggests that they are probably from New Zealand. In the workbooks for her writing Katherine Mansfield classified many of her stories by the designation L. or N.Z. according to their setting of London or New Zealand.

Honeymoon – critical commentary

George is like many of the male figures in Mansfield’s stories – a catalogue of gaucheness and insensitivity. He summons cabs in a peremptory manner which worries Fanny; he speaks French badly; thinks living in a villa would be ‘deadly’ unless surrounded by other people; deals badly with the restaurant manager; is xenophobic; and congratulates himself on his rudeness.

Whilst Fanny wants to stay at their ‘little table’ and feels that ‘nothing matter[s] except love’, George suddenly wants to go back to their hotel – the clear implication being that since he feels a flush of physical well-being, he intends to have sex with her.

The story is related largely from Fanny’s point of view, so we are presented with a rather negative character sketch of a male as perceived by a female – which is one reason why Katherine Mansfield is admired by feminists. Much of this presentation is made by understatement and implication, so none of her criticism is explicit. Indeed, Fanny is full of admiration for this man she has married – which is why it is important to register distinctions between Fanny’s views and those of the Mansfield-as-narrator.

‘Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,’ coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table , and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, ‘This all right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there?’ And he nodded to a table right over the other side.

What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was sit down and look like everybody else.

George is gauche and immediately in conflict with the manager. He congratulates himself on his antagonistic view of the interchange, and his suggestion for alternative seating puts everyone into an awkward position. Fanny naively perceives his behaviour as masterful – and yet her instinct is for a simpler, calmer resolution to the episode.

Thus we are provided with three points of view in this one brief scene: the narrator’s perceptive image of the manager’s gesture; George’s self-congratulatory egoism; and (simultaneously) Fanny’s naive admiration of her new husband at the same time as her instinct for a more sensitive response to the situation.

Honeymoon – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

Honeymoon – plot summary

A young couple, George and Fanny, are on their honeymoon on the Mediterranean coast. George is a forceful and positive character, whilst Fanny is rather hesitant and uncertain about herself.

After shopping they decide to go for tea to a hotel-restaurant on the sea front. George patronises their cab driver, and Fanny feels a sense of trepidation at the freedom afforded her by her state of being as a newlywed.

At the restaurant George resists the manager’s attempts to control them, and Fanny admires his masculinity but wonders if he wants to understand her at a deep level.

Meanwhile a small group of musicians begin playing whilst they take their tea. Then the group is joined by an old man in faded clothes who sings in Spanish with passion and fervour.

Fanny is moved by the experience and wonders existentially about the cruelty and suffering in life; but George reacts differently, feeling optimistic and physically stimulated.

George suggests that they go back to their hotel at once, before the man can start singing again – so they leave.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1888. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker, who went on to become chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She was first cousin of Elizabeth Beauchamp, who married into German aristocracy to become Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had a somewhat insecure childhood. Her mother left her when she was only one year old to go on a trip to England. She was raised largely by her grandmother, who features in some of the stories as ‘Mrs Fairfield’.

1895. She attended Karori State School with her sisters, and proved to be gifted at writing, even though her spelling was poor.

1898. Attended Wellington Girls’ High School. Some of her earliest sketches appeared in the school magazine, and she won a composition prize for ‘A Sea Voyage’.

1901. She attended a private finishing school, showed a somewhat precocious interest in notions of ‘free love’, and continued writing stories. It is obvious even at this early stage that she was interested in creating a good prose style. The following was written when she was fifteen:

This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers, has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain.

1902. She becomes very passionate about writing and music, and is greatly influenced by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, whose notoriety at that time was still at its height. She falls in love with Arnold Trowell, the son of her cello teacher.

1903. The family travel to London, and KM attends Queen’s College in Harley Street which had been founded by Charles Kingsley to prepare young women for higher education. On her first day there she meets Ida Baker, who was to become a central figure in the rest of her life. Five of her sketches appear in Queen’s College Magazine.

1906. She gives herself up to a rather bohemian lifestyle, and has affairs with both men and women. Because of this, her parents take her back home to New Zealand against her wishes.

1907. Three sketches and a poem published in the Melbourne Native Companion.

1907. Love affairs with two girls. Her family send her on a tour of New Zealand’s northern island. Love affair with a Maori girl.

1908. Her family give up in the fight against her rebellious nature, and she is allowed to go back to London with an allowance of £100 per year from her father. She lodges in Little Venice, and is in love with Garnet Trowell (Arnold’s twin brother).

1909. Pregnant by Garnet Trowell, she marries singing teacher George Bowden and leaves him the same evening (without consummating the marriage) to join a travelling light opera company in Glasgow. Her mother travels from New Zealand to restore order, and takes KM to Bavaria for what she describes as a ‘cold water cure’. She has a miscarriage.

1910. Returns to London, where she is hospitalised for gonorrhoea. She then goes back to live with her husband. Some of her stories are published in the New Age, alongside writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Hilare Belloc. At this stage she begins to suffer from severe bouts of illness.

1911. She has an abortion, then travels to Bruges and Geneva. In a German Pension published in the autumn.

1912. Meets John Middleton Murry and becomes with him the editor of a magazine which causes something of a scandal by its title alone – Rhythm. They live together, moving from England to France and back again, sometimes living together with her most devoted ex-lover, Ida Baker, who KM sometimes calls her ‘wife’.

1913. Friendships and fallings-out with both Henri and Sophia Gaudier-Brzeska, and Frieda and D.H.Lawrence. Last issue of Rhythm. Four stories published in the Blue Review, which then failed. Works as a film extra.

1914. Murry declared bankrupt: he leaves London to live in the country. KM ill: she writes love letters to fellow Rhythm contributor Francis Carco in France.

1915. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp visits her in London on his way to join regiment. KM leaves Murry and travels to Paris to live with Francis Carco. She is then reconciled with Murry, then goes back to Carco in France. Begins to write The Aloe (which becomes Prelude). Three stories published in Signature, which then folds. Brother killed in war. Moves to live in Bandol, France.

1916. Moves to Zennor, Cornwall with the Lawrences, who have violent rows and fights. Finally ‘leaves’ Murry. Visits Ottoline Morell’s home at Garsington, Oxfordshire.

1917. Moves to live in Chelsea, and begins to write ‘narratorless’ stories. Meetings with Virginia Woolf. Both of them realise that they are making similar experiments in prose fiction, and feel a combination of rivalry and friendship.

1918. Moves back to live in Bandol. Tuberculosis diagnosed. Returns to London and divorces George Bowden. Marries John Middleton Murry (wearing Frieda Lawrence’s wedding ring). They live together in a house in Hampstead – together with Ida Baker. Prelude published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

1919. Regular contact with Virginia Woolf. Writes reviews for the Athenaeum (edited by Murry). Moves to San Remo Italy with Ida Baker. Murry visits occasionally.

1920. Moves to live in Menton, France. Murry begins to dally with other women. KM returns to London. Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. Returns to France.

1921. Returns to London to scare off Princess Bibesco, who has been dallying with Murry. Moves to live in Switzerland, where her neighbour Rainer Maria Rilke is writing the Duino Elegies. Intense creative bursts between bouts of severe illness.

1922. Moves to Paris for radium treatment for her TB. Moves back to Switzerland. Murry leaves KM, who prepares her will, making Murry her literary executor. Returns to France to join in the mystic ‘treatment’ which was then fashionable at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainbebleau, France.

1923. Murry arrives in Fontainebleau on the day that KM dies – 9 January 1923, aged just thirty-five.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield biography

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography of a literary bohemian

Katherine Mansfield has the rare distinction of being regarded as a major writer, even though she only ever published short stories. In fact her entire oeuvre is available in just one volume. There are two other biographies by Jeffrey Myers and Anthony Alpers, but Claire Tomalin’s is a fairly straightforward and very readable account of her life. She portrays her talent sympathetically, but does not disguise her weaknesses and her occasional unkindnesses, though she does seem either squeamish or even purblind where sexual matters are concerned. However, she is very well informed and spares us none of the medical details of gonnorhoea and tuberculosis which helped to bring KM’s life to a premature end.

Mansfield’s talent blossomed as soon as she was sent from her privileged but stiflingly conformist upbringing in New Zealand to be educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street. These important years – from fourteen to seventeen – confirmed her taste for artistic matters, and it was on return from there to New Zealand that she had her first success as a writer.

But in 1908 she was back in London, ready to throw herself into full scale Bohemianism. She quickly became pregnant, then tricked another man into marrying her without telling him about her condition, and left him the same night. Within the next few months she suffered a miscarriage and acquired a new Polish lover, from whom she contracted gonnorhoea.

She recovered in the company of her life-long partner Ida Baker, whom she regarded as her ‘wife’, then since she was short of money she tricked her way back into free lodging with her lawful husband and began publishing with A. R. Orage’s New Age, which was later to become the New Statesman.

More literary success followed. She published her first collection of sketches In a German Pension, then was introduced to John Middleton Murry, who became her lover then her second husband.

In structure, the book is almost one chapter per year from 1907 onwards of Mansfield’s tragically short life. Tomalin does not disguise the fact that she thinks much of the earlier work is self-indulgent, sentimental, and quite weak – which it is. But there would be greatness to come.

Lots more of La vie Boheme follows: constantly on the move; short of money; living promiscuously in every sense; and writing for small literary magazines which either don’t pay or go out of business.

She leaves Murry and travels to northern France in the middle of the First World War for an assignation with fellow artist Francis Carco, then goes back to Murray, and by 1916 is in deep with The Bloomsbury Group, even moving into a house in Gower Street with painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington.

When the first signs of the tuberculosis which was to kill her appeared, she went to live in Bandol with her ‘wife’ Ida, then when her health temporarily improved, she returned home to London and married Murray, with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda as witnesses.

She had a spasmodic but very close relationship as fellow authors with Virginia Woolf. Both of them were working on the development of the short story and the possibilities of a more elliptic prose style at the same time. Both regarded each other’s work highly, even though they knew that they were ‘rivals’.

Tomalin gives a very clear-headed critique of the patchiness of KM’s writing, as well as a persuasive account of the biographical basis for much of its content – but she does not say much about what made her writing and the development of the post-Checkhov short story so original.

KM’s last years were a restless search for a cure for her illnesses, combined with an outpouring of her greatest works. She zigzags back and forth across northern Europe, finally dying outside Paris in 1923. She was just thirty-five years old.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, London: Penguin, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0140117156

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield critical essays

August 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

Katherine Mansfield – Critical Essays is a collection of conference papers given to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s arrival in London from New Zealand in 1908, and the start of her career as a writer. They are arranged in groups dealing with biographical readings, modernism, psychoanalytic interpretations, and autobiography. Biographist Vincent O’Sullivan attempts to explain why Mansfield was so impressed by the mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and so influenced by Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy – but his comments tell us more about the details of her last years than they do about the nature or the quality of her writing. Another essay does something similar by tracing her relationship with John Middleton Murry and the use they made of fragments of biography in the fictions they both produced.

Some essays go into endless detail blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction, ignoring the distinctions which should be made between the two. On the whole, they end up by saying very little of value about either. Considering that most of the authors are senior academics, it’s amazing that so little effort is made to be rigorous about these matters – though I suppose it proves the powerful attraction that biographical ‘evidence’ still exerts on critics, even though they might profess themselves post-modern.

Sarah Sandley is on much firmer grounds looking at Mansfield’s fondness for the cinema, and even tracing the films she was likely to have seen. She then offers fairly clear evidence from the texts to argue that she used filmic techniques in her approach to narrative.

As an aside, it is interesting to note how many of these essays revert to consideration of the same story – ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ – which anybody embarking on this volume would do well to re-read before looking at the separate studies.

There’s a brave contribution that tries to establish links between Mansfield’s writing and her interest in music. She was an accomplished cellist, and it’s true that her compositions often have a conscious structure which can be likened to a musical form. But the convincing evidence is never produced. Mansfield writes about music and has characters who are musicians – but that’s all. It’s only possible to say that one artistic form may be likened to another. Any more than that is rather like Goethe saying ‘Architecture is frozen music’: it’s a striking phrase, but it doesn’t yield analytic insights or go anywhere.

A section of psychoanalytic readings is the signal for an intensification of theoretical jargon and fashionable name-dropping – but most of the contributions remain unconvincing.

Fortunately, the last group of essays dealing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction are on much stronger ground. Mansfield left a substantial account of her life and feelings behind in her journals, letters, and notebooks, never concealing the fact that many of her stories were based on episodes from her own life.

Janet Wilson has an interesting piece which looks at Mansfield’s conflicted feelings over her status as a colonial settler and the sympathies for natives she felt – particularly in her erotic relationship with her friend, the half-Maori girl Martha Grace Mahupuku.

Angela Smith makes an insightful and largely persuasive case for Mansfield’s appreciation of Charles Dickens – a taste she held at a time when Dickens was considered passé in most literary circles.

There’s an article by Anna Jackson on the ‘poetics’ of the notebooks and letters, and the collection ends with an essay by the Mansfield scholar and novelist C.K. Stead recounting the difficulty of establishing properly edited texts of her work.

These later pieces seem to rescue the collection from the blight of literary criticism in its current manifestation as a mechanism for generating career-enhancing fodder for the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.241, ISBN: 023027773X

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield criticism

May 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Katherine Mansfield criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Mansfield and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a paperback copy of Antony Alper’s biography The Life of Katherine Mansfield was available at Amazon for one penny.

The Life of Katherine Mansfield – Antony Alpers, Oxford University Press, 1987. This is one of the first serious biographies, written by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar Antony Alpers.

Katherine Mansfield – Ida Constance Baker, London: Michael Joseph, 1971. A memoir by Mansfield’s long-suffering yet most devoted friend.

Katherine Mansfield (Writers & Their Work) – Andrew Bennet, Northcote House Publishers, 2002. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks.

Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer – Gillian Boddy, Penguin Books, 1988.

Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield – Mary Burgan, Johns Hopkins Press, 1994. This study shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women’screativity. It concludes that Mansfield’s drive toward self-integration was her strategy for writing–and for staying alive.

Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories – Pamela Dunbar, Palgrave Schol Print, 1997. A new evaluation of Katherine Mansfield reveals her as an original and highly subversive writer preoccupied with issues like sexuality and the irrationality of the human mind.

Katherine Mansfield – Joanna FitzPatrick, La Drome Press, 2014.

Katherine Mansfield (Key Women Writers) – Kate Fullbrook, Prentice Hall, 1986.

Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories – Cherry A. Hankin, London: P{algrave Macmillan, 1983.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence – Melinda Harvey, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. This study shows that ‘influence’ is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment.
Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller – Kathleen Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weaving together intimate details from Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals with the writings of her friends and acquaintances, this study creates a captivating drama of this fragile yet feisty author: her life, loves and passion for writing.
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction – Sydney Janet Kaplan, Cornell University Press, 1991.

Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A collection which ncludes essays by major scholars in several areas including musicology, postcolonial theory, epistolary and biographical studies, representing recent developments in Modernist studies and thus exploring her continued literary legacy to contemporary writers.

Katherine Mansfield and World War One – Gerri Kimber (ed), Edinburgh University Press, 2014.The articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, these essays refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy.

Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story – Gerri Kimber, Palgrave Pivot, 2014. This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield’s themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader – via close textual analysis – to an understanding of the author’s modernist techniques.

Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe.

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public – Jenny McDonnell, London: Palgrave Schol Print, 2010. This study provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain.
Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View – Jeffrey Meyers, Cooper Square Publishers, 2002. This study chronicles her tempestuous relationships (that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis.

Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction – Patrick D. Morrow, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield’s fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime.

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks – Margaret Scott, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. The first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed, these diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman.

Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) – Angela Smith, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. This study explores Mansfield’s idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive.

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life – Claire Tomalin, London: Penguin, 2012. A biography which captures the creative zest of a writer who was sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism – Janet Wilson (ed), London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Reinterpretations and readings enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to Mansfield’s diaries and letters. These essays combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class, gender, and biography/autobiography.

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Marriage a la Mode

December 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Marriage a la Mode was one of a group of six stories commissioned from Katherine Mansfield by Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere, a fashionable illustrated newspaper targeted at British citizens living in the colonies. The story was written in August 1921 and published in December the same year. It was later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories published in 1922.

Marriage a la Mode – William Hogarth

Marriage a la Mode – critical commentary

Anthony Alpers, Katherine Mansfield’s biographer, describes Marriage a la Mode as a ‘shallow … bill-paying’ story whose lack of depth and subtlety is a result of her badly needing money to pay doctors’ fees during her illness whilst living in Montana-sur-Sierre in Switzerland.

It is certainly true that the story requires very little close reading or interpretive skill to yield its single meaning. William is a crushed husband figure whose tender feelings for his family are completely trampled upon by his wife’s selfishness, her social climbing, and her self-indulgent bohemianism. He is more or less excluded socially from his own home by her empty-headed friends. When he is driven by necessity to communicate his love for her by letter, she responds by reading it out for the amusement and mockery of her house guests. When she realises what a heartless and vulgar thing she has done, there is a momentary impulse to reach out to her husband in response – but instead she chooses to rejoin her friends.

It is a sceptical, if not jaundiced view of marriage, but it is to Mansfield’s credit that as a writer who so often reveals masculine foibles and insensitivities in her work, she creates here a sympathetic account of a working man and a scathing portrayal of his selfish and empty-headed wife.

Plagiarism?

A number of commentators have pointed to the similarities between Marriage a la Mode and a story by Anton Checkhov called Not Wanted (1886). In fact the most severe of these critics have accused her of direct plagiarism.

In Checkhov’s story a Court official Pavel Zaikin is travelling out to his summer cottage by train in the summer heat. He complains to a fellow traveller in ‘ginger trousers’ about the cost and inconvenience, which he attributes to ‘women’s frivolity’.

He finds his son alone in the cottage: his wife is attending the rehearsal of a play and has not prepared any dinner. Zaikin feels anger gnawing at him and in bad temper he scolds his son without reason – then regrets having done so.

His wife Nadyezhda returns from the rehearsal with her friend Olga and two men. She sends the servant out for ‘sardines, vodka, and cheese’. The thespians then begin noisy rehearsals until late, after which she invites the two men to stay the night. She also moves Zaikin out of his own bed to accommodate Olga. In the early morning Zaikin gets dressed and goes out into the street, where he meets the man in ginger trousers again. He too has a houseful of unexpected visitors.

The similarities in the two stories are the working husband who is abused by a self-indulgent wife; the train journey; the houseful of disruptive bohemians; and the fact that the man is treated like an outsider in his own home.

But this was not the first time Katherine Mansfield had re-told a story by Checkhov. Her early piece The-Child-Who-Was-Tired is taken from Checkhov’s Sleepyhead (1888) and her plagiarism was the subject of a debate on her conscious or unconscious borrowings in the pages of theTimes Literary Supplement in the 1950s.

However, she composed so many original and outstanding stories of entirely her own invention, that it is unlikely these accusations will cause the damage to her reputation some people hope for and others fear. But there is one telling detail in Marriage a la Mode that nails the story inescapably to its Russian origins – and that is the choice of sardines for the improvised evening meal. Isabel’s arty friends consume sardines and whisky, whilst Checkhov’s amateur theatricals have their sardines and vodka. There is simply no escaping the fact that this detail is copied. Fish and vodka are entirely native to Russian culture, but would be exceptional in English social life.

Marriage a la Mode – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

Marriage a la Mode – plot summary

A London solicitor William is returning home on Saturday afternoon to his fashionable and demanding wife Isabel. He feels anxious about not having bought presents for his two sons, but buys them a melon and pineapple instead. He reads through legal papers, but is distracted by thoughts of his wife, who has cooled in her feelings towards him. They have moved from a modest to a much bigger house, and Isabel has made new friends, but William thinks back to their earlier days when he was happier.

Isabel is waiting for him at the station, but she is accompanied by some party-loving friends. She appropriates the fruit, and they buy sweets for the boys instead, meanwhile making asinine comments. When they arrive at the house, the party go off swimming, leaving William to reflect critically on the way the house is being run. Returning from the swim, they eat sardines and drink whisky, disattending to William.

The following day William is preparing to return to London. He has not seen his sons and has had no opportunity to talk to Isabel. When he gets to his train he decides to write to her instead.

The next day Isabel and her friends are lazing about in the sun when William’s letter arrives. It is a long love letter in which he reveals his feelings for her, and says he doesn’t want to stand between her and her happiness. She reads it out aloud to her friends, who scoff and make fun of the letter. Isabel suddenly feels ashamed of what she has done, and has the impulse to write a reply, but when the friends invite her to go swimming, she leaves with them instead.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Voyage a close reading

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to analyse prose fiction

Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves being sensitive to all the subtle uses of language in the hands of skilled writers.

This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being explored. It also includes the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words – which might vary from plain and simple to complex and ‘literary’.

Syntax
The arrangement of words in sentences. Often used for emphasis or dramatic effect.

Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile, metaphor, puns, alliteration, and irony.

Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism.

Rhythm
The cadence or flow of words and phrases – including stress and repetition.

Narrator
Ask yourself, who is telling the story.

Narrative mode
First or third person narrator. (‘I am going to tell you …’ or ‘He left the room in a hurry’)

Point of view
The perspective from which the events of the story are related.

Characterisation
How a character is created or depicted.

Dramatisation
How any dramatic elements of a piece of work are created and arranged.

Plot
How the elements of the story are arranged.

Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing

Structure
The shape of the piece of work, or the connection between its parts.

Theme
The underlying topic or issue, as distinct from the overt story.

How to read closely

Close reading can be seen as a form of special attention which we bring to a piece of writing. It involves thinking more deeply than usual about the implications of the words on the page. Most normal people do this automatically, without being specially conscious of the fact. The academic study of literature brings the process more to the surface and makes it explicit. There are four levels or types of reading which become progressively more complex.

Language – You pay especially close attention to the surface elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.

Meaning – You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they contain, plus any further meanings they might suggest.

Structural – You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the language or the meanings.

Cultural – You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author,
or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading.

The good news is that most people already possess the basic skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so. This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance starts off with simple issues of language, then progresses to more complex literary criticism.The volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance on this site was written by the same author.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Voyage. This concerns the journey made by a young girl at night on a ferry with her grandma. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

The Voyage

If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry. … Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white wooly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream.

Here are some comments, using the checklist as a guide. The objective is not to be totally exhaustive, mulling over every single word and punctuation mark in the paragraph. Rather, it’s to develop the skill of being sensitive to language, and to notice special effects when they are offered.

It’s also true that a really in depth close reading is much easier if you know the author’s work well – so that you can see regular patterns of language use and recurrent effects and themes.

Vocabulary
The language of the passage is fairly plain and simple. Apart from the term ulster (an overcoat) which might not be familiar to readers today, most of the terms used would be known even to a reasonably well-educated child. And this is entirely appropriate since Mansfield is relating the story to us largely from a child’s point of view. Her use of terms such as ‘>little skip’, ‘ neat sausage’, ‘tiny boy’, and baby fly reinforce this effect.

Syntax
The word order and grammar is that of normal written English. The only feature I can observe here under this heading is that in some clauses she separates the subject from its verb by interposing dependent clauses – ‘Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by’. But this is just giving variety to her construction of sentences.

Rhythm
She creates a briskness and liveliness in her prose to match the business of what is going on in the scene. This is done by the variation of sentence length. The first is quite short, the second is longer, but it is split into two which have a similar construction to the first.

It’s also done by her use of a form of repetition called parallelism. Notice how ‘quick, nervous strides’ is echoed by ‘crackling black ulster’: the construction is ‘adjective + adjective + noun’.

Figures of Speech
Under figures of speech you might have noticed the simile – ‘like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream’. That is, the small baby boy is directly compared to a fly. Then there is an example of onomatopoeia in the phrase ‘crackling black Ulster‘ – because the words themselves sound like the thing they are describing.

There is also an example of anthropomorphism in the swan’s-head-handled umbrella giving Fenella a ‘sharp little peck’ on the shoulder. That is, the inanimate object is spoken of as if it were alive – and once again this is entirely appropriate given that the story is being told from the child’s point of view.

Mansfield also uses alliteration more than once. In ‘crackling black Ulster’ there is repetition of the ‘a’, ‘ck’, and ‘l’ sounds; and in ‘white wooly shawl’ there is repetition of the ‘w’ and the ‘l’ sounds.

Tone
This can be quite a difficult feature to pin down accurately, but I think in this passage you could say that there was a light, brisk and somewhat playful attitude to what is going on. That’s the safest way of defining tone – describing the author’s attitude to the subject as briefly as possible. The tone here is entirely appropriate – because we are being invited to see the world from a child’s point of view.

Narrative mode
This is the traditional manner of story-telling using the third person and omniscient narrator. That is, Fenella is referred to as ‘she’ and Katherine Mansfield, as the person telling the story, does not intrude as an ‘I’ speaking directly to the reader. Moreover, as narrator, she knows what is going on in her characters’ heads and their feelings. She is ‘all-knowing’, which is what ‘omniscient’ means.

Narrator
This must be Katherine Mansfield, because she does not invent another person who stands between herself and the reader, telling the story. This might seem rather obvious, but some authors invent a fictional narrator who tells the story, and might even be a character in it.

Characterisation
It’s not easy to say a lot, based on such a short extract. But you might observe that ‘grandma bustled along’, which gives the impression of a lively older woman. (This is confirmed by events later in the story). And the observations about the umbrella and the little boy, as well as the ‘little skip’ Fenella is forced to make, help to establish her as a young girl.

Notice that Mansfield as narrator does not tell us that Fenella is a young girl: we work this out from the few details we have been given. Notice too that this information about the characters is being given piecemeal as the story progresses. We are being left to put together these pieces ourselves.

Point of view
Many of these small details – the peck from the swan’s head umbrella, the little boy looking like a fly – help to establish that the story is being told from Fenella’s point of view. That is, the events of the story are being shown as she would experience and see them. This is quite an important feature of prose fiction.

Drama
It’s not easy to say much about this based on such a short extract – or if we were reading the story for the first time. But most of the tension in the story is created by the fact that we are not quite sure what is going on. But returning with more knowledge of the story, we might note that the father is ‘nervous’ because he is due to be separated from his mother and his daughter. The grandmother ‘bustles’ along because she has the task of conveying Fenella to her new life.

Meanwhile Fenella is busy observing the world around her. Notice a small (and dramatic) detail of the world she sees. The little boy is being ‘jerked along angrily between his father and mother’ [my emphasis]: that is, the way some adults treat their children is not so pleasant.

We’ll stop at this point. It’s not really possible to say anything about plot, structure, or theme unless you’ve read the whole story. But almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading a piece of work. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connections there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

That’s why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Wind Blows

January 29, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, comment, study resources, and plot summary

The Wind Blows was first published on 27 August 1920 in the Athenaeum (edited by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry) and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories (1920).

The Wind Blows – critical commentary

The story is a wonderfully subtle, restrained, and even understated evocation of the emotional turmoil in the maturation process of a young teenage girl. The portrait is composed of her reactions to the people in her life and the atmosphere of her surroundings. To these are added a number of suggestive symbols and metaphors that Mansfield selects to suggest her sexualisation and emotional growth.

These suggestions begin with the phenomenon that gives the story its title – the wind. As every teacher knows, young people are enlivened and even excited by windy weather – and Matilda is no exception. She is woken up by the wind and thinks ‘something dreadful has happened’. But it hasn’t – the disruption is merely a relection of her febrile transitory feelings. She is part way between being a girl and a woman.

Next she thinks that life is ‘hideous and simply revolting’ and she ‘hates’ her mother for trying to control her appearance – particularly her hair. This is clearly a portrait of adolescent unrest, or ‘growing pains’ as they are sometimes known.

She also feels a sense of competition with the girl next door – Marie Swainson – seeing her as reckless and possibly a sexual rival: ‘Her skirt flies up about her waist … she doesn’t mind what she does’. Matilda is also irritated that Marie turns up for her piano lesson ‘hours before her time’, thus breaking the spell of Matilda’s contact with the teacher Robert Bullen.

For when she arrives at the home of her teacher the story takes a distinctly erotic turn. Matilda feels comforted by Mr Bullen’s enviornment and engaged by his manner – his ‘very nice hand’ and the fact that he speaks ‘so kindly’. Her own fingers ‘tremble’ and ‘her heart beats so hard she feels it might lift her blouse up and down’. She is so affected by his presence and the romance of playing Beethoven that she starts to cry.

Mr Bullen uses the language and gestures of seduction. He takes hold of her hands, allows her to rest her head against him, and resorts to a flattering cliché – ‘that rare thing, a woman’. Fortunately for Matilda, the spell of this moment is broken by the arrival of her rival Marie Swainson.

When she goes to the harbour with her brother Bogey she takes her hat off and allows her hair to fall free – defying her mother’s injunction. The height and force of the stormy sea is a clear reflection of the disturbed feelings and potential for liberation that she feels inside herself.

This liberation is confirmed and underscored in the visionary moment of imagining her older self on board the ship, looking back as it leaves the island and sailing out to sea. Matilda then sees her younger self as the girl who cried that day at her music lesson ‘many years ago’. Two separate periods of time are telescoped into one before the story ends on the same note as it began – with the wind.

The Wind Blows – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Wind Blows – plot summary

Matilda is a young teenage girl living in south New Zealand with her mother and her brother Bogey. On a particularly windy autumn day she feels somewhat irritated by life and is at odds with the world, partucularly her mother’s fuss over her appearance and clothing.

She goes to a piano lesson with her teacher Mr Bullen, where she feels soothed by his avuncular manner and the atmosphere of his drawing room. He seems to her a protective and slightly romantic presence, to which she is in the process of yielding when they are interrupted by the arrival of his next pupil, Matilda’s neighbour Marie Swainson.

Back home she continues to feel an existential resentment regarding her home life. When her bother suggests a walk on the esplanade she feels it as a liberation. They go down to the harbour where they see a steamer putting out to sea. She has a vision of herself and Bogey on board the ship as older people, leaving the island and looking back on their youthful past.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

A Cup of Tea – study resources

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Honeymoon – critical commentary

Honeymoon – study resources

Honeymoon – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield – web links

biography of a literary bohemian

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Marriage a la Mode – critical commentary

Marriage a la Mode – study resources

Marriage a la Mode – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary – critical commentary

The Canary – study resources

The Canary – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

how to analyse prose fiction

tutorial, comment, study resources, and plot summary

The Wind Blows – critical commentary

The Wind Blows – study resources

The Wind Blows – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Get in touch