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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.

Katherine Mansfield biographyMansfield’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.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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


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Filed Under: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Katherine Mansfield Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, Short story, Virginia Woolf

The Awakening and Other Stories

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

short stories from a ‘new woman’ of the 1890s

Kate Chopin was an American writer who is now best known for her novel The Awakening (1899) which was ‘re-discovered’ in the 1960s. But in fact she was a professional and quite successful author in her own lifetime who earned part of her living by placing her short stories with magazines. Her stories embrace the modern tradition, created in the late nineteenth century, of describing situations or dramatic episodes, then leaving them to speak for themselves.

The Awakening and Other Stories Without doubt she was what many people would call ‘ahead of her time’. It is no surprise that with the reassertion of women’s rightful place in cultural history which occurred in the 1960s, she was seen as an unjustly neglected figure. And reading her stories today, it’s amazing how fresh and modern they seem, My guess is that she will now retain her place in the literary canon.

She comes from the aristocratic landowning south of the United States with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean as its neighbours, and this cultural miscegenation is reflected in her writing – both in the linguistically rich mixture of English, French, and Spanish vocabulary and in the mores of her characters.

She tackles many of the subjects favoured by ‘new women’ of the period – the critique of patriarchy, the yearning for self-expression amongst females, the social perspective on daily life which sees the personal as political.

Her default manner is a mild Jane Austen-like irony which reveals the vanities and foolishness of everyday life. In tone and literary style, she is very much a precursor to Jean Rhys – another female Caribbean writer who explored similar themes.

The major text in this collection is her short novel or novella – The Awakening. It’s this work by which she is now best known, but in fact this should not detract from her accomplishments as a writer of short stories.

The Awakening is a slow, beautifully paced work set in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Edna Pontellier is a married woman on summer holiday on the Gulf in the process of waking up to a new sense of responsiveness to the world. She does this via ecstatic responses to social mood, to romantic music, and to swimming at night.

A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and hr soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

The narrative is composed of short scenes, pregnant with significance, which follow each other like the acts of a play. She captures perfectly the elegant cadences of the aristocratic landowning south of which she was part.

When the holiday is over she progressively distances herself from her husband and even her children. She is also surprised to discover that she misses a young would-be lover when he leaves abruptly to seek his fortune in Mexico. Nevertheless, when her husband goes away on business she begins a flirtation with another man.

With husband conveniently out of the way, when the first lover returns unexpectedly, she declares herself to him, but almost immediately realises that one man succeeding another in her life is not the answer to the process of self-realisation which her summer experiences have brought about.

This has quite rightly become a central text for anyone even mildly sympathetic to the feminist movement – the story of a conventionally successful woman who chooses to reject the central values of her society in favour of pursuing a goal of self-realisation. Ultimately, she opts to pay the ultimate price for doing so – but the consummate skill with which her narrative is articulated makes it a milestone of the twentieth century, on whose eve it was published.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.410, ISBN: 0192823000


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Filed Under: Short Stories, The Novella, The Short Story Tagged With: Kate Chopin, Literary studies, Short story, The modern short story

The Short Story an Introduction

August 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

wide-ranging survey of story types and subjects

The structure of this introductory study of the short story as a literary genre is twenty short chapters, each one dealing with a different theme – character, orality, modernism, minimalism, urbanity, and so on. And each theme is explored with reference to three or four short stories considered in some depth. The advantage of this approach is that Paul March-Russell covers many neglected aspects of the short story: why it has declined commercially; how its reputation is propped up by university creative writing courses; and what has been the role of the little magazine in keeping it alive.

The Short Story an introductionThe disadvantage is that sometimes it seems as if everything is being skimmed over in a rather superficial manner. The other strength which is also a weakness is the sheer range of his examples – which is obviously the result of very wide reading.

He cover a huge variety of writers from America and Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond. The names stream off the page at a bewildering rate. I suspect that this will inspire many young would-be writers to read more widely – which is the good part. But I sometimes wished he would dwell longer and explore fewer writers in more depth.

He also has the odd habit of mixing historical periods and writers without any restraint. Even his conglomerations of examples – J.P.Hebel, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Alan Poe – are bizarrely listed out of chronological order.

He considers all the possible variants of the short story – the parable, fable, folk tale, creation myth, and what he calls the ‘art tale’ – the conscious literary contrivance which he claims bridges the gap between the folk tale and the modern short story.

He also deals with the riddle as a sub-genre of the short story – one thing described as if it were something else, as if two non-identical things were the same. But I think he’s mistaken to include the novella as if it merely a long story.

As one chapter follows relentlessly after another – post modernism, minimalism, post colonialism – it becomes apparent that he is cataloguing his reading experience by its subject matter or the literary fashion to which authors have been ascribed. This impression is reinforced by the fact that there is no summarising chapter. He does not draw any general conclusions or produce any synthesis of his arguments.

In later parts of the book his themes – the city, the individual character – are examined with reference to novels and novellas, as well as stories, in a way which seems to confirm that he is more concerned with making use of his undoubtedly wide reading experience, rather than concentrating on the subject in hand – the short story.

This is a book with almost too much substance for its own good – too many illustrative examples – and too little concise argument. [I suspect it’s a re-vamped PhD thesis.] But if it leads readers on to further explorations of the neglected short story as a literary genre, that would be no bad thing.

One of his best chapters challenges the orthodoxy of Edgar Alan Poe’s theory of the short story (that it should be tightly focussed on unity of effect) and he even offers a defense of the much criticised O. Henry. There’s also an interesting chapter on the state of the short story in the UK today- which might well give aspirant writers pause for thought.

The good thing about these disparate reflections is that they do throw up many interesting topics which literary studies students can take further. As an introductory study, it fulfills that function well.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.291, ISBN: 074862774X


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Filed Under: The Short Story Tagged With: Literary criticism, Literary studies, Short stories, Short story

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