Katherine Mansfield, one of New Zealand’s most beloved writers, was born Katherine Beauchamp in 1888. In 1908 she left Wellington for London, never to return to her homeland except in her fiction.

Mansfield led a famously bohemian lifestyle, conducting numerous affairs and romantic attachments with men and women, including Thomas Middleton Murray (whom she eventually married in 1918). It was through Murray that she met Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, with whom she developed lasting—if fiery—friendships.

In addition to her friendships with Woolf, Lawrence, and Carrington, she was on the periphery of the Bloomsbury group for years. T.S. Eliot even warned Ezra Pound that she was a “dangerous woman.” Though her politics and aesthetics were clearly influenced by this set, her own artistic voice attracted the admiration of many of her contemporaries. Virginia Woolf called it “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

Mansfield left her English friends in 1920, seeking a cure for the tuberculosis that, in conjunction with the untreated venereal disease she’d contracted in her twenties, was slowly killing her. “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” dates from this productive period on the Riviera, during which time she produced some of her best work. It was published in Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922—that watershed year of modernist work that also saw the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

Although Mansfield’s works vary widely, one device she used regularly that can be identified as a nod to modernist sensibilities is her focus on her characters’ inner lives rather than the ‘reality’ of their day-to-day existence. This rejection of the “objectivity” of realism was taking place in literature, visual art, theatre, and even film. Replacing it was an assertion of the primacy of individual experience—whether of the creative artist or her characters. Private fantasy thus serves as a form of resistance to reality.

Mansfield’s lifespan coincides with a high point in women’s short story writing (1890-1930). Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has noted a common thread in women’s short stories from this period, a thread that ties Mansfield to her female contemporaries and to the fervor of feminist activity that also marks this period. This common “conflict between secret visions and unwelcome realities, between personal desires and family restrictions, between consolatory dreams and hostile circumstances” is an inner life in conflict with its surroundings.

Certainly it is the intense subjectivity of Con and Jug’s ‘unwelcome reality’ that provides the pleasure in reading the story. Private fantasy serves as resistance for them as well. Our pleasure, however, is countered by our sense of the sisters’ “lost possibility of another life” where they can be women instead of daughters. Their loss implies that ‘consolatory dreams’ are all some women ever have. For the activists of their period and ours, consolation simply isn’t enough.

Compiled from: The Secret Self: Short Stories by Women, Hermione Lee, ed; Katherine Mansfield: Short Story Moderniser at NZEDGE.com; and Katherine Mansfield at New Zealand Book Council Site

[November 2004]

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